HISTORY LESIONS
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
With an introduction by Tom Engelhardt
tomdispatch.com
February 19, 2004
Tomgram: Constantino, our historical multiplication tables
Let's remember, when we do our historical multiplication tables, that everything happening now began somewhere, some time. Take the construction and engineering company Kellogg, Brown & Root, now serving (and feeding) our troops in Iraq in so many overpriced ways. It was founded as Brown & Root in Texas in 1919; sponsored the political career of, and was then sponsored in its search for government contracts by Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson; after being swallowed up by Halliburton, a burgeoning oil-services firm, in 1962, it followed vice president, then president LBJ into Vietnam where it was deeply involved in constructing "infrastructure" - bases and the like - for the U.S. military. As Jane Mayer reminds us in her recent New Yorker article on Halliburton and its former CEO, our present vice president, in those rebellious and sardonic days Brown & Root was known to many American soldiers by the familiar nickname, "Burn and Loot."
And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut might say. And so it continues to go, as KBR, still part of Halliburton, supports the American effort in Iraq to the tune of multi-billions in support of another vice president with an even closer relationship to the company. What pet names our soldiers in Iraq have bestowed on KBR this time around I don't know, nor do I know who built the "infrastructure" for our first great offshore imperial venture, our annexation and conquest of the Philippines over a century ago, though Filipino columnist Renato Redentor Constantino might well.
The war in Vietnam we're re-imagining and arguing over in this presidential season is but a pale shadow of the grisly event itself, and our no less grisly military years in the Philippines, which paved the way for Vietnam, are long gone from American memory, though, as Constantino wants to remind us below, they shouldn't be.
And yet it would be incorrect to say that no one remembers this ancient history. Perhaps it's just that the wrong people remember it the wrong way. Take the following recent remarks by former general and would-be viceroy of Iraq Jay Garner, who was quickly replaced by L. Paul Bremer in the early days of our Iraqi debacle:
"'I think one of the most important things we can do right now is start getting basing rights' in both northern and southern Iraq, Garner said, adding that such bases could provide large areas for military training. 'I think we'd want to keep at least a brigade in the north, a self-sustaining brigade, which is larger than a regular brigade,' he added.
"Noting how establishing U.S. naval bases in the Philippines in the early 1900s allowed the United States to maintain a 'great presence in the Pacific,' Garner said, 'To me that's what Iraq is for the next few decades. We ought to have something there ... that gives us great presence in the Middle East. I think that's going to be necessary.'"
Back in the years between the conquest of the Philippines and the war in Vietnam, the Pacific was sometimes spoken of here as "America's lake" and in the World War II years there was even a tin-pan alley tune with the pop title, "To be specific, it's our Pacific." Somehow, "America's desert" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, and I don't think the title, "To be specific, they're our oil reserves" would fly.
History's wounds, as columnist Renato Redentor Constantino tells us below, tend to bleed endlessly and sometimes for centuries. It's always good to hear from a voice who remembers in a way that matters. Tom
HISTORY LESIONS
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
February 19, 2004
tomdispatch.com
And so here we are, at the crossroads of another day, speechless and troubled by what is before us, so anxious to engage in a conversation with what ought to be, and yet so unaware of or indifferent to a past waiting to explain itself, to be heard, to be remembered.
"You have to understand the Arab mind," said Capt. Todd Brown, a U.S. company commander with the 4th Infantry Division in Iraq, who had led his troops in encasing Abu Hishma in a razor-wire fence to contain the resistance suspected to be coming from the village. "The only thing they understand is force."
Over a century ago, during a period of history that few Americans today can recall, another U.S. general uttered similar words. It would take at least "ten years of bayonet treatment" to make Filipinos accept American rule, said Gen. Arthur MacArthur, even as, to deprive the "enemy" of popular support, U.S. troops herded whole Filipino villages into concentration camps -- precursors of the strategic hamlets used by the United States during the Vietnam War and the razor-wire fences now employed by the troops commanded by Capt. Brown to enclose defiant Iraqi villages.
History. How much better off we would all be today if only we remembered more -- beginning with the origins of the relationship between the Philippines and the United States, a chapter which in our history is called the Philippine-American War; a chapter that began on February 4, 1899 and lasted an endless decade, which largely defined not only the pathways Filipinos were forced to take over the next century but the imperial directions that have framed recent U.S. history as well.
By returning to this vast and incredibly brutal conflict, Americans (and Filipinos) today may yet find what they have lost: the key to understanding the depravities of the present and, perhaps, their collective deliverance.
The triggers for war
For an empire perennially weighed down by the necessity of justifying aggression, triggers for war are providentially everywhere, to be pulled expediently whether real or not. In the spring of 2003, it was weapons of mass destruction in Never-Never Land or al-Qaeda connections. In 1964 in Vietnam, it was an attack by North Vietnamese gunboats. In 1899, it was "savages attacking our boys." Anything will do.
When Lyndon Johnson's administration launched its long-planned full-scale bombing campaign in Vietnam, it did so using the authority granted by Congress under the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, named after the site where North Vietnamese torpedo boats allegedly attacked U.S. destroyers on August 2 and 4, 1964. With domestic concern growing over an escalating U.S. military intervention, the Tonkin Gulf incidents gave the Johnson government the leverage it needed to pressure Congress to authorize an open assault on Vietnam. Reports of the alleged attacks caused such a rumpus that, by August 7, 1964, within three days of the second incident, Congress had passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution by a vote of 416 to 0 in the House of Representatives and with just two dissenting votes in the Senate.
Only later was it revealed that a draft version of the resolution had been prepared prior to the alleged attacks; that the provocation on August 2 actually came from the U.S. side -- an American destroyer deliberately entered North Vietnam's territorial waters escorting South Vietnamese boats -- and that the August 4 attack did not take place at all. By the time the Johnson administration's manipulation of the incidents was exposed, however, the US was already deeply "committed" to a full-scale American-led war in Vietnam.
As we cycle backwards in history, we find a similar and no less bloody tale of cold-blooded imperial calculation and script-writing.
To kill a republic
The last decade of 1890 was an invigorating time for Filipino revolutionaries. After four centuries of largely inchoate revolts, Filipinos had united in 1892 under the banner of an organization whose goal was to overthrow Spanish colonial rule and create a democratic Filipino republic. By 1896, born out of well-articulated aspirations for national economic and political independence, open revolutionary war had commenced. By the first few days of 1899, the revolutionary movement had not only defeated Spain, but assembled a government ready to administer to the needs of a victorious if war-weary populace.
Such a dream of an emergent republic was not to be, however, for an expansive America had different ideas about how the islands should be ruled. Behind the backs of the Filipinos, the government of President William McKinley ended its brief war with Spain by signing the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898. Under it, the Philippines was conveniently ceded to the United States. The constitution, however, prevented the implementation of a treaty annexing Asia's first republic without ratification by two-thirds of the Senate.
McKinley knew he lacked that required two-thirds vote, but this did little to stop him from pushing through the treaty. If the US took possession of the islands, Philippine cane sugar would be allowed to enter the country with no tariffs placed on it, thus reducing costs for sugar refiners, the biggest of which was the American Sugar Refining Company, a backer of the president. This was at a time when some in Congress were arguing that Americans could enjoy all the economic opportunities the Philippines had to offer without bothering with annexation. But as Admiral George Dewey -- who would soon play a major role in the occupation -- put it, "Capital would not feel safe to invest in the Philippines unless the United States annexed the islands."
Cold-blooded calculus
In the end, outright bribery -- the 19th century version of present-day PACs, hordes of lobbyists, and "revolving doors" -- did the trick for McKinley, delivering a large portion of the needed votes into his hands. In order to tip the balance, however, the president needed one more thing, a trigger for war that would drive the rest of the votes his way.
Weeks before war broke out, the War Department began to issue announcements meant to prepare the public for the fact that "U.S. forces would have to defend themselves" if attacked by "natives" -- even as American troops were deployed to Manila itself. On February 2, the Navy dismissed all Filipinos employed on its ships in Manila harbor, while Army regimental commanders were given orders to provoke a conflict with the Filipino forces. On the same day, a U.S. regiment deliberately occupied an area called Santol where Filipino republican troops were already positioned. The Filipinos protested but, not wishing to ignite hostilities, eventually withdrew.
On the evening of February 4, 1899, US soldiers in Santol were instructed to venture yet further into territory held by Filipino troops, with the order "to shoot if the need arose." The Americans soon encountered Filipino sentries whom they immediately fired upon. The private who first opened fire reportedly shouted to his companions, "Line up, fellows, the niggers are in here all through these yards." Hours later, McKinley announced to the press "that the insurgents had attacked Manila." The next day he dispatched instructions to crush the Filipino army.
An emissary from the Filipino side was dispatched to the American commanders to request "a cessation of hostilities" and explain that the provocation actually came from their own troops. He was rebuffed by the Army commander, who told him that the fighting "having begun, must go on to the grim end." News of "savages" and "barbarians" who had "fired on the flag" soon filled American newspapers. On February 6, the Senate ratified the treaty by exactly one vote more than the needed two-thirds and the Philippines formally became a colony of the United States amid soaring promises of better lives for Filipinos. Yet it would take the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of those same Filipinos in a decade-long orgy of pacification before armed resistance to U.S. rule was finally crushed.
Liberating souls
"You never hear of any disturbances," said a U.S. congressman just back from Manila at a moment when McKinley had launched a campaign of "Benevolent Assimilation" in the Philippines, "… because there isn't anybody left to rebel… The good Lord in Heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under the ground. Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country, and wherever and whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him."
Before he took command of the Army during the war, Gen. J. Franklin Bell announced: "All consideration and regard for the inhabitants of this place cease from the day I become commander. I have the force and authority to do whatever seems to me good and especially to humiliate all those … who have any pride."
"I want no prisoners, I wish you to kill and burn: the more you kill and burn the better you will please me," was the order Gen. Jacob Smith issued a century ago as his troops slaughtered civilians and Filipino revolutionaries alike defending the first republic in Asia and the freedom they had just wrested from Spain. Smith had ordered his troops to turn the island of Samar into a "howling wilderness" so that "even birds could not live there." When asked by a soldier to define the age limit for killing, Smith replied, "Everything over ten." Foreshadowing the fate of Lt. William Calley, who was found guilty of leading U.S. soldiers in perpetrating horrors in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai and who served only four and a half months of his life sentence behind bars after which he was pardoned by Richard Nixon, Gen. Smith was court-martialed for issuing his barbaric orders, found guilty, and sentenced to - an admonition.
Explaining the brutality meted out by American soldiers to Filipinos, a Boston Herald correspondent covering the war commented, "Our troops in the Philippines … look upon all Filipinos as of one race and condition, and being dark men, they are therefore 'niggers,' and entitled to all the contempt and harsh treatment administered by white overlords to the most inferior races." As early as April 1899, a US commander was already predicting, "It may be necessary to kill half the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be advanced to a higher place of life than their present semi-barbarous state affords."
As it turned out, however, not that many died. As early as 1901, the number of Filipinos who had been killed or had died of disease as a result of America's vile occupation was pegged by a U.S. general at a "mere" 600,000 -- a horrific figure considering that it took the United States another decade to literally wipe out Filipino resistance.
And America keeps asking itself, "Why do they hate us so?"
"We're going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of world," said Senator Wayne Morse, who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in the U.S. Senate. "It's an ugly reality, and we Americans don't like to face up to it. I hate to think of the chapter of American history that's going to be written in the future in connection with our outlawry in Southeast Asia."
When Americans are ready to ask the question, "Why have we learned so little?" they will see hands extended to them waiting to be grasped; people elsewhere eager to tell them, in Arundhati Roy's words, "how beautiful it is to be gentle instead of brutal, safe instead of scared. Befriended instead of isolated. Loved instead of hated." Folks waiting to whisper in their ears, "Yours is by no means a great nation, but you could be a great people."
Renato Redentor Constantino is a writer and painter based in the Philippines. He writes a weekly column for the Philippine national daily, TODAY (whose online partner is abs-cbnnews.com). He lives in Quezon City with his wife, Kalayaan Pulido, and their two kids, Rio Renato and Yla Luna.
References: Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother, 1991; Saul Landau, "The Iraq ploy and Resemblances to the Start of the Cold War," November 28, 2002; Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, The United States and the Modern Historical Experience, 1985; Daniel Boone Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War, 1972; Jonathan Shephard Fast and Luzviminda Bartolome Fransisco, Conspiracy for Empire: Big business, Corruption and the Politics of Imperialism in America, 1876-1907, 1985; Dexter Filkins, "US tightens grip on Iraq with tough new tactics," TODAY, December 8, 2003; Kim Petersen, Dissident Voice, July 29, 2003; Arundhati Roy, "Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy, Buy One Get One Free," transcript of audio address in New York, May 13, 2003.
Copyright C2004 Renato Redentor Constantino
Recent political and travel essays by Renato Redentor Constantino. Email Red at redcosmo(at)gmail(dot)com.
Friday, February 20, 2004
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
THE SECOND OF FEBRUARY
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
February 2, 2004
The second day of the second month of 2004. What lessons will the day harbor and reveal 20, 50, 100 years from now? Who knows what the day will bring?
Today, there are other stories to tell. Stories of loss and celebration and terrible things.
Forty five years ago on the evening of February 2, Richard Valenzuela, stocky Jiles P. Richardson and Charles Hardin Holley boarded a small chartered plane bound for eternity. They had just played at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa and, like most of the people lucky enough to have attended a gig of "The Winter Dance Party Tour," a magical traveling concert that intended to cover 24 cities in three weeks, the crowd went wild with the performance despite the freezing cold.
Valenzuela wasn't supposed to be on the chartered plane but won a seat on the aircraft after betting that night on heads at the toss of a coin. Richardson, who was running a fever after the Surf Ballroom concert, was given a seat on the plane by a friend who took pity on his condition. Holley was just dying to fly after spending too much time riding a cold bus hired for the tour. The year was 1959. The plane carrying the performers would crash minutes after take-off, killing the performers and the pilot and immortalizing rock 'n roll greats Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper.
February 2 means many things to different people. On this day in 1933, Adolf Hitler ordered the dissolution of the German Parliament just two days after he was elected Chancellor. On February 2, 1848, the US-Mexican war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo where Mexico ceded a humongous portion of its territory to the US, including what is now California and all lands north of the Rio Grande. The US 'agrees' to pay a measly $15 million in claims.
The mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, who once said "War does not determine who is right - only who is left," died on February 2 in 1970 at the age of 98. Propaganda plaything G.I. Joe also debuted as a popular toy on Feb. 2, 1964 and helped immensely to erase the insight behind the counsel of Russell, who also famously said "Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so."
In 1862, on the second day of February, the journalist Samuel Clemens published his first report in the Virginia City Enterprise. Eight years later to the day, Clemens would marry Olivia Langdon. The world would come to know Clemens more by his pseudonym, Mark Twain, author of novels such as Huckleberry Finn. Twain: a fierce anti-imperialist who was among the staunchest opponents of America's annexation in 1899 of the fledgling Philippine Republic - the first republic in Asia.
Twain, who ages ago wrote with acute wit and prescience, "Sphere of Influence: a courteous modern phrase which means robbing your neighbor -- for your neighbor's benefit."
On February 2, 1899, US Colonel Frederick Funston gave secret orders to the 20th Kansas Volunteer Infantry stationed in the Philippines to bring about a conflict with Filipino revolutionaries. Several regimental commanders gave similar instructions on the same day to their officers and soldiers. Two days later, the American commanding general gave the order to "open fire."
Filipinos, defending the freedom they had just wrested from Spain, fell like flies before the firepower of the US Army and Navy, prompting a leader of the revolutionaries to call the next day for a "cessation of hostilities and the establishment of a neutral area between the troops." To the Filipino leader's request, however, the American commander replied, the fighting having begun "must be carried on to the grim end."
Why is not such a hard question. In a testimony to the US Congress on the Filipino-American War, no less than Gen. Arthur MacArthur revealed that "We had a pre-arranged plan. Our tactical arrangements there were very perfect, indeed ... I simply wired all commanders to carry out pre-arranged plans, and the whole division was placed on the firing line." Presaging close to a century the scorn heaped by Washington today on an ignorant and craven US public, a shrewd American senator projected "As soon as one American soldier fell in an attack by the Filipinos, sentiment would vanish, and the American people would stand behind the Army as they had always done."
Through shrewd cold-blooded plotting by the McKinley administration and its US sugar interest patrons, America had "bought" the Philippines from Spain weeks earlier for $20 million through the infamous Treaty of Paris. A treaty which would be useless unless it was ratified by the US Senate, which was then generally against America's occupation of the Philippines.
Until, of course, the "pre-arranged plan" that MacArthur had spoken of went into play.
By February 5, a day after the order to open fire was issued, American papers were already screaming 'They fired on the flag!' 'America has been attacked,' and 'Savages are killing our boys!' And by February 6, just four days after US commanders in the Philippines received instructions to provoke hostilities with Filipino revolutionaries, the US Senate passed the Treaty of Paris by a vote of two-thirds plus one and the Philippines formally became a colony of the United States.
Lies, plunder and hideous valor nailed to the mast of imperial warships. Machinations over a hundred years old and yet all too familiar.
"The past is never dead," William Faulkner once said. "It's not even past."
Notes:
1. Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history teacher got wrong, James Loewen, Touchstone, 1996.
2. Republic or Empire, Daniel Boone Schirmer, Schenkman Publishing Company, 1972, reprinted in the Philippines. See the chapter "The treaty passes" in the said book in http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/dbs/re09b.html
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
February 2, 2004
The second day of the second month of 2004. What lessons will the day harbor and reveal 20, 50, 100 years from now? Who knows what the day will bring?
Today, there are other stories to tell. Stories of loss and celebration and terrible things.
Forty five years ago on the evening of February 2, Richard Valenzuela, stocky Jiles P. Richardson and Charles Hardin Holley boarded a small chartered plane bound for eternity. They had just played at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa and, like most of the people lucky enough to have attended a gig of "The Winter Dance Party Tour," a magical traveling concert that intended to cover 24 cities in three weeks, the crowd went wild with the performance despite the freezing cold.
Valenzuela wasn't supposed to be on the chartered plane but won a seat on the aircraft after betting that night on heads at the toss of a coin. Richardson, who was running a fever after the Surf Ballroom concert, was given a seat on the plane by a friend who took pity on his condition. Holley was just dying to fly after spending too much time riding a cold bus hired for the tour. The year was 1959. The plane carrying the performers would crash minutes after take-off, killing the performers and the pilot and immortalizing rock 'n roll greats Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper.
February 2 means many things to different people. On this day in 1933, Adolf Hitler ordered the dissolution of the German Parliament just two days after he was elected Chancellor. On February 2, 1848, the US-Mexican war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo where Mexico ceded a humongous portion of its territory to the US, including what is now California and all lands north of the Rio Grande. The US 'agrees' to pay a measly $15 million in claims.
The mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, who once said "War does not determine who is right - only who is left," died on February 2 in 1970 at the age of 98. Propaganda plaything G.I. Joe also debuted as a popular toy on Feb. 2, 1964 and helped immensely to erase the insight behind the counsel of Russell, who also famously said "Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so."
In 1862, on the second day of February, the journalist Samuel Clemens published his first report in the Virginia City Enterprise. Eight years later to the day, Clemens would marry Olivia Langdon. The world would come to know Clemens more by his pseudonym, Mark Twain, author of novels such as Huckleberry Finn. Twain: a fierce anti-imperialist who was among the staunchest opponents of America's annexation in 1899 of the fledgling Philippine Republic - the first republic in Asia.
Twain, who ages ago wrote with acute wit and prescience, "Sphere of Influence: a courteous modern phrase which means robbing your neighbor -- for your neighbor's benefit."
On February 2, 1899, US Colonel Frederick Funston gave secret orders to the 20th Kansas Volunteer Infantry stationed in the Philippines to bring about a conflict with Filipino revolutionaries. Several regimental commanders gave similar instructions on the same day to their officers and soldiers. Two days later, the American commanding general gave the order to "open fire."
Filipinos, defending the freedom they had just wrested from Spain, fell like flies before the firepower of the US Army and Navy, prompting a leader of the revolutionaries to call the next day for a "cessation of hostilities and the establishment of a neutral area between the troops." To the Filipino leader's request, however, the American commander replied, the fighting having begun "must be carried on to the grim end."
Why is not such a hard question. In a testimony to the US Congress on the Filipino-American War, no less than Gen. Arthur MacArthur revealed that "We had a pre-arranged plan. Our tactical arrangements there were very perfect, indeed ... I simply wired all commanders to carry out pre-arranged plans, and the whole division was placed on the firing line." Presaging close to a century the scorn heaped by Washington today on an ignorant and craven US public, a shrewd American senator projected "As soon as one American soldier fell in an attack by the Filipinos, sentiment would vanish, and the American people would stand behind the Army as they had always done."
Through shrewd cold-blooded plotting by the McKinley administration and its US sugar interest patrons, America had "bought" the Philippines from Spain weeks earlier for $20 million through the infamous Treaty of Paris. A treaty which would be useless unless it was ratified by the US Senate, which was then generally against America's occupation of the Philippines.
Until, of course, the "pre-arranged plan" that MacArthur had spoken of went into play.
By February 5, a day after the order to open fire was issued, American papers were already screaming 'They fired on the flag!' 'America has been attacked,' and 'Savages are killing our boys!' And by February 6, just four days after US commanders in the Philippines received instructions to provoke hostilities with Filipino revolutionaries, the US Senate passed the Treaty of Paris by a vote of two-thirds plus one and the Philippines formally became a colony of the United States.
Lies, plunder and hideous valor nailed to the mast of imperial warships. Machinations over a hundred years old and yet all too familiar.
"The past is never dead," William Faulkner once said. "It's not even past."
Notes:
1. Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history teacher got wrong, James Loewen, Touchstone, 1996.
2. Republic or Empire, Daniel Boone Schirmer, Schenkman Publishing Company, 1972, reprinted in the Philippines. See the chapter "The treaty passes" in the said book in http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/dbs/re09b.html
Monday, January 26, 2004
WINTER IN HONGKONG
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
January 26, 2004
Close to midnight, the crowd became noticeably thicker after Tin Hau station and the pace of walking slowed considerably until, once inside Victoria Park, the mass of people morphed into a river I had somehow melded with and walking became an involuntary reflex.
Inside Victoria Park that night was a churning multitude guided by huge signs pleading "One Way!" and "No entry!" and propelled by gaiety and shouting, the jostling an annual expedition in search of all things lucky. It was the eve of the Chinese New Year and Victoria Park was Lucky Charms Central, a gathering place of residents and goodwill and wishes for a bountiful new Lunar Year. It was the eve of the Year of Monkey, when Hong Kong fortunetellers work overtime and temples swell with huge crowds and anything red sells like hotcakes, including underwear. No matter how tacky, observed the Agence France-Presse, "if it's red it's hot!"
Hours later, after a short and fitful sleep, I found myself strolling past Victoria Park on my way to Hong Kong Central and saw the empty stalls and other skeletal remains of the previous night's party. First day of the Lunar New Year. The human river had emptied, and in place of the throng were hundreds of Indonesian domestic help seated in small huddles, nibbling on packed meals and chatting away around benches and trees and the stone floor of the park. Half an hour away by foot, communes of Filipina domestic workers occupied the peripheries of pedestrian lanes surrounding the Admiralty Centre.
It was windy, the sky was overcast and the temperature hovered around 10 degrees.
Man has set foot on the moon and Mars, I thought, as I walked towards the Star Ferry terminal. Trillions of dollars pass through the global casino economy daily and a dizzying array of technological devices are created each year that allow people to traverse with the blink of an eye boundaries once upon a time restricted by geography. The bold new world of a new global order for some. And for the rest, an old world segregated by familiar borders.
During holidays such as the Lunar New Year and on Sundays, many walkways leading to Hong Kong Central are lined with cluster upon cluster of Filipina domestic help literally living a slice of life on the margins.
This is their momentary domicile - perimeters demarcated by corrugated cardboards and lain along the sides of footpaths and walkways - the space between destinations constituting neither starting point nor ending and largely emblematic of their condition.
Here, when they take the day off, between Chater Garden and the majestic Jardine House, Filipina domestic help colonize tiny two-meter cardboard squares fenced with bags and plastic and marked frequently by a terrace of shoes. Few dare to step on the cardboard with their footwear on; it is a geometric space that is kept free from dirt where they are free to be languid and carefree with their limited free time.
They share food and newspapers and stories here, plenty of stories, among clusters where resignation exists side by side with resolve and where stories are as much a domain as the margins that for a few hours will be their temporary autonomous dwelling. With their stories they trespass each other's domains freely and make them often into their own.
Here, South Asian and Chinese peddlers flock around a group squatting underneath a large Banyan tree. The vendors are selling blouses, phone cards and fake perfume, their wares in small suitcases and packets that are easy to carry in case a policeman suddenly turns up. Foreign domestic helpers are a huge market here; disposable income is often spent on gifts for the family back home, Sunday wear, lunch in a decent restaurant, or the ubiquitous mobile phone.
Here, in her corrugated abode, a Filipina plays tong-its, a Filipino version of poker, and other card games except solitaire, which is played rarely. Here, she opens a container of steaming soup that she passes around till there is nothing left but smiles all around. Drinks are shared and a few oranges are soon peeled eaten, pieces of the fruit making its way to a cluster sitting beside them.
Here, five women are caught in a heated argument, and they argue all at once so that only the surrounding clusters are aware of the points each one is making. Those within earshot already know the troubles of the five women and some are already chuckling; others, however, have turned their eyes away and ignore the noise, embarrassed for the women.
In another cardboard square, a young Filipina is in tears and three older women surround her and try to comfort her; the young one' sobs are gentle but her face bears a grief that appears inconsolable.
Here a shout goes up and a woman stands up and wild cheer bursts from her group; the woman has won the pot in a poker game and she does a silly jig around a pile of Hong Kong coins. It is a trivial amount but they are having a good time.
Here a young woman leans on the shoulders of another who has dozed off; one arm is wrapped around the sleeping woman's waist and their hands are clasped and their faces are tranquil.
The cardboard squares are of no use against the cold of Hong Kong's winter, but somehow they provide vital warmth. They are precincts of both malady and joy, for in the modern Filipino experience that is migrant work, despondency has fused with the delight of companionship.
Notes:
1. Plenty of thanks to Mike Davis for "Bush and the Great Wall" and to tomdispatch.com for publishing the Davis article.
2. "Plenty of Monkey business promised in spending spree" Georgina Lee, The Standard-HK, January 21, 2004.
3. "Superstition makes new year comeback!" Cindy Sul, The Standard-HK, January 20, 2004.
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
January 26, 2004
Close to midnight, the crowd became noticeably thicker after Tin Hau station and the pace of walking slowed considerably until, once inside Victoria Park, the mass of people morphed into a river I had somehow melded with and walking became an involuntary reflex.
Inside Victoria Park that night was a churning multitude guided by huge signs pleading "One Way!" and "No entry!" and propelled by gaiety and shouting, the jostling an annual expedition in search of all things lucky. It was the eve of the Chinese New Year and Victoria Park was Lucky Charms Central, a gathering place of residents and goodwill and wishes for a bountiful new Lunar Year. It was the eve of the Year of Monkey, when Hong Kong fortunetellers work overtime and temples swell with huge crowds and anything red sells like hotcakes, including underwear. No matter how tacky, observed the Agence France-Presse, "if it's red it's hot!"
Hours later, after a short and fitful sleep, I found myself strolling past Victoria Park on my way to Hong Kong Central and saw the empty stalls and other skeletal remains of the previous night's party. First day of the Lunar New Year. The human river had emptied, and in place of the throng were hundreds of Indonesian domestic help seated in small huddles, nibbling on packed meals and chatting away around benches and trees and the stone floor of the park. Half an hour away by foot, communes of Filipina domestic workers occupied the peripheries of pedestrian lanes surrounding the Admiralty Centre.
It was windy, the sky was overcast and the temperature hovered around 10 degrees.
Man has set foot on the moon and Mars, I thought, as I walked towards the Star Ferry terminal. Trillions of dollars pass through the global casino economy daily and a dizzying array of technological devices are created each year that allow people to traverse with the blink of an eye boundaries once upon a time restricted by geography. The bold new world of a new global order for some. And for the rest, an old world segregated by familiar borders.
During holidays such as the Lunar New Year and on Sundays, many walkways leading to Hong Kong Central are lined with cluster upon cluster of Filipina domestic help literally living a slice of life on the margins.
This is their momentary domicile - perimeters demarcated by corrugated cardboards and lain along the sides of footpaths and walkways - the space between destinations constituting neither starting point nor ending and largely emblematic of their condition.
Here, when they take the day off, between Chater Garden and the majestic Jardine House, Filipina domestic help colonize tiny two-meter cardboard squares fenced with bags and plastic and marked frequently by a terrace of shoes. Few dare to step on the cardboard with their footwear on; it is a geometric space that is kept free from dirt where they are free to be languid and carefree with their limited free time.
They share food and newspapers and stories here, plenty of stories, among clusters where resignation exists side by side with resolve and where stories are as much a domain as the margins that for a few hours will be their temporary autonomous dwelling. With their stories they trespass each other's domains freely and make them often into their own.
Here, South Asian and Chinese peddlers flock around a group squatting underneath a large Banyan tree. The vendors are selling blouses, phone cards and fake perfume, their wares in small suitcases and packets that are easy to carry in case a policeman suddenly turns up. Foreign domestic helpers are a huge market here; disposable income is often spent on gifts for the family back home, Sunday wear, lunch in a decent restaurant, or the ubiquitous mobile phone.
Here, in her corrugated abode, a Filipina plays tong-its, a Filipino version of poker, and other card games except solitaire, which is played rarely. Here, she opens a container of steaming soup that she passes around till there is nothing left but smiles all around. Drinks are shared and a few oranges are soon peeled eaten, pieces of the fruit making its way to a cluster sitting beside them.
Here, five women are caught in a heated argument, and they argue all at once so that only the surrounding clusters are aware of the points each one is making. Those within earshot already know the troubles of the five women and some are already chuckling; others, however, have turned their eyes away and ignore the noise, embarrassed for the women.
In another cardboard square, a young Filipina is in tears and three older women surround her and try to comfort her; the young one' sobs are gentle but her face bears a grief that appears inconsolable.
Here a shout goes up and a woman stands up and wild cheer bursts from her group; the woman has won the pot in a poker game and she does a silly jig around a pile of Hong Kong coins. It is a trivial amount but they are having a good time.
Here a young woman leans on the shoulders of another who has dozed off; one arm is wrapped around the sleeping woman's waist and their hands are clasped and their faces are tranquil.
The cardboard squares are of no use against the cold of Hong Kong's winter, but somehow they provide vital warmth. They are precincts of both malady and joy, for in the modern Filipino experience that is migrant work, despondency has fused with the delight of companionship.
Notes:
1. Plenty of thanks to Mike Davis for "Bush and the Great Wall" and to tomdispatch.com for publishing the Davis article.
2. "Plenty of Monkey business promised in spending spree" Georgina Lee, The Standard-HK, January 21, 2004.
3. "Superstition makes new year comeback!" Cindy Sul, The Standard-HK, January 20, 2004.
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
THE VITAMINS OF ERMA GEOLAMIN
Renato Redentor Constantino
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
January 19, 2004
She is the mother of all our children and she represents both the core character of the Filipino -- selflessness and resilience -- and the fate that millions of other Filipinos have had little choice but to accept. There are eight million Filipinos working abroad today; 130,000 of them are in Hong Kong. Erma Geolamin, a foreign domestic help for 14 years, is one of them.
Erma left the country in 1990, the year the great earthquake shook Baguio and Cabanatuan. "I remember very little about what happened in the year I left," Erma said, "except that it was a painful parting. Oh, I think Rino Arcones died that year too."
"Who's Arcones?" I asked. "He was with Bombo Radyo. I've always dreamt of being a reporter," Erma said, suddenly spry. "Arcones was an idol of mine. He's very brave; I think I'm foolishly brave like him also. I always listened to Rino's broadcasts then. He was always exposing some scandal. When he died that year, it made me really sad. But that was a long time ago," Erma said dismissively.
Erma, a college graduate, first worked in Malaysia for four years; later on she moved to Hong Kong where the pay was a little higher, which meant that her children would all have a better chance to finish school.
Many things had happened since she left the country. In 1999, Erma left her husband when she found out that he had squandered the savings she had been sending home and that he had been sleeping with another woman, whose occupation she found severely unnerving. "All the while I toiled, he was sleeping with an embalmer," Erma exclaimed closing her eyes as if to shake off the thought. Erma is like many Filipinos; she can be solemn and feisty in the span of a second, capable of finding something oddlyamusing even in the most dire of situations, and she does not fear death but is deathly afraid of the dead.
There have been three new administrations since Erma left the Philippines in 1990, and possibly a fourth one unless Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo gets reelected. So much has changed and so much has remained the same, particularly the nastier ones. Year after year, Filipinos working overseas continue to remit to the Philippines the dollars that keep the country's economy afloat. And year after year, too, the Philippine government automatically re-exports the dollars earned by Filipino migrant workers to pay or debts many of which were ill-gotten. According to the Freedom from Debt Coalition, from 1980 to 2002, the Philippine government automatically allocated a mind-boggling P2.5 trillion for debtpayments.
What does she say to all this, I asked Erma one cold January morning in Hong Kong. Was she aware at all of this policy?
Yes, she said, but only recently. "It is cruelty. They have no right to throw out what we have earned. They should all go to jail, especially the officials who allow this to continue."
Who will you vote for this coming elections, I asked Erma, who has devoted the little spare time she has to helping address, among other things, the electoral needs of Filipinos in Hong Kong, a highly organized work force which had the highest turn-out of registered voters among all the countries that participated in the recent overseas voter registration process. Perhaps because 94 percent of the Filipinos working in Hong Kong are women?
"President Arroyo and Roco are both very arrogant and I don't like them," Erma said "And their intelligence has meant nothing." "And Fernando Poe, Jr.?" I asked. "FPJ?" Erma replied as she laughed. "What about Pimentel?" I asked. "Pimentel is very good but he won't win. Even so I would have voted for him but he's no longer running [for president] he said. Sayang." "Ping Lacson?" I asked. "I think I will only vote for senators," said Erma.
Bitter years have not corroded her spirit. Erma continues to feed herself the vitamins of survival and meaning. Such as regular texting with her youngest child, who is now in high school; challenging, along with nine others, the legality and constitutionality of the Hong Kong government's recent decision drastically reducing the minimum wage of foreign domestic help in Hong Kong; Sunday church and lunches at Hong Kong City Hall with her fellow Ilonggos; and the fulfillment of one of her dreams. Since 2002, Erma has been sending regular articles to a Hong Kong-based Filipino newspaper, which also helps augment her income.
Her stories are all true to life and reflect a keen discriminating eye. The kleptomaniac employer who steals from his Filipina maid's wallet. A Filipina mother of three, whose love for the child of her Chinese employer was as if the child was one of her own, despite the language barrier and notwithstanding the difficulty of handling the child's frequent epileptic seizures. The comical account of a Filipina domestic help who was constantly hungry because her employer often gave her only a biscuit each day "and sometimes no biscuits at all." "One day," Erma said, "the Filipina decided to set aside HK$5 from the money she was given to buy daily groceries. The Filipina told herself that if her employer would not give her anything to eat, then part of the grocery money should be spent to buy her food. The Filipina bought only bread, which she would hide in a secret place and take out only after the owner had left. One day, however, after her employer had gone out of the apartment, she discovered that the bread was gone. Then out of nowhere, Erma recounted, "the child of the owner appeared and surprised the Filipina. 'Where did you get the bread,' the child asked. Fed up with sneaking about, the Filipina firmly told the child 'I pinch money from your father because he doesn't even give me anything to eat!' The child replied 'Well can you take some more from my dad? He doesn't give me anything to eat either.'"
"If you want friendship, gentleness and poetry to cross your path through life," said Georges Duhamel, "take them with you." Erma Geolamin continues to live Duhamel's wisdom and longs only for a few more things. To the permanent proximity of family she adds something new -- long prison terms for the officials who keep on throwing out of the country her life's honest earnings.
* * * * *
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Renato Redentor Constantino
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
January 19, 2004
She is the mother of all our children and she represents both the core character of the Filipino -- selflessness and resilience -- and the fate that millions of other Filipinos have had little choice but to accept. There are eight million Filipinos working abroad today; 130,000 of them are in Hong Kong. Erma Geolamin, a foreign domestic help for 14 years, is one of them.
Erma left the country in 1990, the year the great earthquake shook Baguio and Cabanatuan. "I remember very little about what happened in the year I left," Erma said, "except that it was a painful parting. Oh, I think Rino Arcones died that year too."
"Who's Arcones?" I asked. "He was with Bombo Radyo. I've always dreamt of being a reporter," Erma said, suddenly spry. "Arcones was an idol of mine. He's very brave; I think I'm foolishly brave like him also. I always listened to Rino's broadcasts then. He was always exposing some scandal. When he died that year, it made me really sad. But that was a long time ago," Erma said dismissively.
Erma, a college graduate, first worked in Malaysia for four years; later on she moved to Hong Kong where the pay was a little higher, which meant that her children would all have a better chance to finish school.
Many things had happened since she left the country. In 1999, Erma left her husband when she found out that he had squandered the savings she had been sending home and that he had been sleeping with another woman, whose occupation she found severely unnerving. "All the while I toiled, he was sleeping with an embalmer," Erma exclaimed closing her eyes as if to shake off the thought. Erma is like many Filipinos; she can be solemn and feisty in the span of a second, capable of finding something oddlyamusing even in the most dire of situations, and she does not fear death but is deathly afraid of the dead.
There have been three new administrations since Erma left the Philippines in 1990, and possibly a fourth one unless Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo gets reelected. So much has changed and so much has remained the same, particularly the nastier ones. Year after year, Filipinos working overseas continue to remit to the Philippines the dollars that keep the country's economy afloat. And year after year, too, the Philippine government automatically re-exports the dollars earned by Filipino migrant workers to pay or debts many of which were ill-gotten. According to the Freedom from Debt Coalition, from 1980 to 2002, the Philippine government automatically allocated a mind-boggling P2.5 trillion for debtpayments.
What does she say to all this, I asked Erma one cold January morning in Hong Kong. Was she aware at all of this policy?
Yes, she said, but only recently. "It is cruelty. They have no right to throw out what we have earned. They should all go to jail, especially the officials who allow this to continue."
Who will you vote for this coming elections, I asked Erma, who has devoted the little spare time she has to helping address, among other things, the electoral needs of Filipinos in Hong Kong, a highly organized work force which had the highest turn-out of registered voters among all the countries that participated in the recent overseas voter registration process. Perhaps because 94 percent of the Filipinos working in Hong Kong are women?
"President Arroyo and Roco are both very arrogant and I don't like them," Erma said "And their intelligence has meant nothing." "And Fernando Poe, Jr.?" I asked. "FPJ?" Erma replied as she laughed. "What about Pimentel?" I asked. "Pimentel is very good but he won't win. Even so I would have voted for him but he's no longer running [for president] he said. Sayang." "Ping Lacson?" I asked. "I think I will only vote for senators," said Erma.
Bitter years have not corroded her spirit. Erma continues to feed herself the vitamins of survival and meaning. Such as regular texting with her youngest child, who is now in high school; challenging, along with nine others, the legality and constitutionality of the Hong Kong government's recent decision drastically reducing the minimum wage of foreign domestic help in Hong Kong; Sunday church and lunches at Hong Kong City Hall with her fellow Ilonggos; and the fulfillment of one of her dreams. Since 2002, Erma has been sending regular articles to a Hong Kong-based Filipino newspaper, which also helps augment her income.
Her stories are all true to life and reflect a keen discriminating eye. The kleptomaniac employer who steals from his Filipina maid's wallet. A Filipina mother of three, whose love for the child of her Chinese employer was as if the child was one of her own, despite the language barrier and notwithstanding the difficulty of handling the child's frequent epileptic seizures. The comical account of a Filipina domestic help who was constantly hungry because her employer often gave her only a biscuit each day "and sometimes no biscuits at all." "One day," Erma said, "the Filipina decided to set aside HK$5 from the money she was given to buy daily groceries. The Filipina told herself that if her employer would not give her anything to eat, then part of the grocery money should be spent to buy her food. The Filipina bought only bread, which she would hide in a secret place and take out only after the owner had left. One day, however, after her employer had gone out of the apartment, she discovered that the bread was gone. Then out of nowhere, Erma recounted, "the child of the owner appeared and surprised the Filipina. 'Where did you get the bread,' the child asked. Fed up with sneaking about, the Filipina firmly told the child 'I pinch money from your father because he doesn't even give me anything to eat!' The child replied 'Well can you take some more from my dad? He doesn't give me anything to eat either.'"
"If you want friendship, gentleness and poetry to cross your path through life," said Georges Duhamel, "take them with you." Erma Geolamin continues to live Duhamel's wisdom and longs only for a few more things. To the permanent proximity of family she adds something new -- long prison terms for the officials who keep on throwing out of the country her life's honest earnings.
* * * * *
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
LORETTA BRUNIO: FILIPINO
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
January 12, 2004
Frowns rarely reach her oval face, but smiles, too, do not come easily. Yet she is never expressionless; everything about her is implicit. Her eyes, the way her hands unconsciously stir as she ponders over a word, the way she nods or shakes her head as if she was just swaying. Her movements are measured like her words and her bearing emanates grace and the quiet dignity that is the reward of all honest toil.
Her name is Loretta Brunio, a tall slender woman from the Bicol region with an imposing soul. She has been working as a foreign domestic help in Hong Kong for 10 years. Though she is an eloquent speaker Loretta rarely speaks in excess; solitude can be a gifted teacher. The observant, however, will notice that facets of Loretta's spirit betray her frequently. When her brows furrow you, too, are troubled; and when she smiles, you soar with her. The rest of the time you listen.
She has been the chairperson thrice of the Coalition for Migrant Rights (CMR), a distinguished organization that she helped form in 1999 - from idea to fruition - and while she continues to work full time as a domestic help she remains a tribune of migrant workers in Hong Kong. A gentle woman whose humility and simplicity frames her very character, not because of the nature of her employment, though this may have been the case when she first arrived in Hong Kong a decade ago, but because, in her words, "there is always a foreign domestic worker here who is in greater need of succor than you are. Hindi lang Pilipino [Not just Filipinos]." Loretta represents the repudiation of stultifying Filipino regionalism. Along with her equally dedicated colleagues, she saw to it that the first composition of CMR were Filipinos, Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Thais, Nepalese and Indians.
You wonder where she finds the time to do all this. Rest should take up the remainder of the day after her work; the body needs pause and the soul needs respite in order to shore up the walls that hem in the cloister of heartaches. But she finds time.
We met on a Sunday at the Hong Kong International Trade and Exhibition Centre in Kowloon Bay, where President Arroyo, who was on her way then to Bahrain, had delivered a two-hour speech to 5,000 overseas Filipino workers, the great majority of whom were Filipina domestic help. Loretta attended the event out of curiosity while I was there to cover Mrs. Arroyo's address -- a mish mash of tired platitudes sprinkled with bizarre spiels. "When I was young, you were just a few hundred then," Mrs. Arroyo had said in a congratulatory tone as she pointed to the Filipino band which had entertained the crowd prior to her arrival. "Now," said the beaming president, "you're in the hundreds of thousands!"
Loretta Brunio. Her sister was the one who had brought her to Hong Kong, she said. "My sister's with a born-again organization in Hong Kong and she thought it was her chance to help me find steady income and get me away from my activist inclinations." Before Hong Kong, Loretta had worked for ten years with a textile industry trade union in Valenzuela. Work did not pay much, she said, but it was important work and it was enough. It seemed to be enough but it wasn't.
"I spent some time attending some of the prayer activities of my sister's group," said Loretta, "but I found neither solace nor motivation there." Within a year, without any planning, Loretta found herself organizing foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. Loretta left the Philippines in 1993, the year Mayon Volcano erupted and the year the Ramos government insanely dismantled tariffs that protected Philippine industries in rates unheard of in the world. Loretta's departure sought to arrest the onset of an impending fact - the absence of a viable future for her children. She wanted food on the family's table and good health and education for her children. In the Philippines, these are aspirations.
For the Philippine government, over which brilliant economists have long held sway, the departure of Loretta and others like her is a boon. They are expected to bring in the dollars that alone have kept the country precariously afloat and have maintained the illusion that the Philippine economy is not sinking under the weight of corruption and the continuation of spectacularly flawed economic policies. Such as the annual automatic allocation of a third of the national budget to pay off debts incurred mostly by thieving officials, corporations and banks - a monumental barbarity that re-exports the dollars remitted by overseas Filipino workers.
And yet this is merely a portion of the madness. For behind almost every statistic of Filipino workers "deployed" by government to work abroad is a home fighting to keep the fabric of family intact.
Loretta has three kids, the youngest of whom, Ivy, was two years old when she left; Abigail, the middle child, was four and J-R was six. Of the three, Loretta said Abigail takes to her the most. "Abigail is very straightforward like me," said Loretta with a rare giggle. "She has a strong personality. She hasn't yet decided on what she wants to do, which is fine. She's enjoying herself." Loretta glowed as she described her children, her smile radiant and enchanting.
J-R, her eldest, is sixteen and about to graduate from high school. "He's the MVP in his basketball league," she said proudly. Loretta said she intended to sign one last contract, which in Hong Kong runs for two years, but "J-R wants to study nautical engineering. He's a clever young man who deserves four years of training, which is expensive. So maybe two contracts and hopefully that's it."
Loretta's eyes shined widest as she described Ivy, her youngest, who is now 12 years old. "We called her Bilog when she was a baby because she was so chubby. The name stuck; I still call her Bilog today even though she is much slimmer. She's a very sweet girl who loves to sing. She has a beautiful voice; I have tapes of Ivy singing. I often play her tapes at night. She's my antibiotic. Some nights, when sadness is overwhelming, I call up Ivy and ask her to sing for me and then I'm okay."
Then Loretta fell silent and her eyes drifted away.
Loneliness is a furtive adversary. In Hong Kong, it has a certain velocity - it loiters around conversations and at night lingers in the space between the blanket and the bed sheet where the woman -- the mother, the daughter, the sister -- curls up and dreams of home.
* * *
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
January 12, 2004
Frowns rarely reach her oval face, but smiles, too, do not come easily. Yet she is never expressionless; everything about her is implicit. Her eyes, the way her hands unconsciously stir as she ponders over a word, the way she nods or shakes her head as if she was just swaying. Her movements are measured like her words and her bearing emanates grace and the quiet dignity that is the reward of all honest toil.
Her name is Loretta Brunio, a tall slender woman from the Bicol region with an imposing soul. She has been working as a foreign domestic help in Hong Kong for 10 years. Though she is an eloquent speaker Loretta rarely speaks in excess; solitude can be a gifted teacher. The observant, however, will notice that facets of Loretta's spirit betray her frequently. When her brows furrow you, too, are troubled; and when she smiles, you soar with her. The rest of the time you listen.
She has been the chairperson thrice of the Coalition for Migrant Rights (CMR), a distinguished organization that she helped form in 1999 - from idea to fruition - and while she continues to work full time as a domestic help she remains a tribune of migrant workers in Hong Kong. A gentle woman whose humility and simplicity frames her very character, not because of the nature of her employment, though this may have been the case when she first arrived in Hong Kong a decade ago, but because, in her words, "there is always a foreign domestic worker here who is in greater need of succor than you are. Hindi lang Pilipino [Not just Filipinos]." Loretta represents the repudiation of stultifying Filipino regionalism. Along with her equally dedicated colleagues, she saw to it that the first composition of CMR were Filipinos, Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Thais, Nepalese and Indians.
You wonder where she finds the time to do all this. Rest should take up the remainder of the day after her work; the body needs pause and the soul needs respite in order to shore up the walls that hem in the cloister of heartaches. But she finds time.
We met on a Sunday at the Hong Kong International Trade and Exhibition Centre in Kowloon Bay, where President Arroyo, who was on her way then to Bahrain, had delivered a two-hour speech to 5,000 overseas Filipino workers, the great majority of whom were Filipina domestic help. Loretta attended the event out of curiosity while I was there to cover Mrs. Arroyo's address -- a mish mash of tired platitudes sprinkled with bizarre spiels. "When I was young, you were just a few hundred then," Mrs. Arroyo had said in a congratulatory tone as she pointed to the Filipino band which had entertained the crowd prior to her arrival. "Now," said the beaming president, "you're in the hundreds of thousands!"
Loretta Brunio. Her sister was the one who had brought her to Hong Kong, she said. "My sister's with a born-again organization in Hong Kong and she thought it was her chance to help me find steady income and get me away from my activist inclinations." Before Hong Kong, Loretta had worked for ten years with a textile industry trade union in Valenzuela. Work did not pay much, she said, but it was important work and it was enough. It seemed to be enough but it wasn't.
"I spent some time attending some of the prayer activities of my sister's group," said Loretta, "but I found neither solace nor motivation there." Within a year, without any planning, Loretta found herself organizing foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. Loretta left the Philippines in 1993, the year Mayon Volcano erupted and the year the Ramos government insanely dismantled tariffs that protected Philippine industries in rates unheard of in the world. Loretta's departure sought to arrest the onset of an impending fact - the absence of a viable future for her children. She wanted food on the family's table and good health and education for her children. In the Philippines, these are aspirations.
For the Philippine government, over which brilliant economists have long held sway, the departure of Loretta and others like her is a boon. They are expected to bring in the dollars that alone have kept the country precariously afloat and have maintained the illusion that the Philippine economy is not sinking under the weight of corruption and the continuation of spectacularly flawed economic policies. Such as the annual automatic allocation of a third of the national budget to pay off debts incurred mostly by thieving officials, corporations and banks - a monumental barbarity that re-exports the dollars remitted by overseas Filipino workers.
And yet this is merely a portion of the madness. For behind almost every statistic of Filipino workers "deployed" by government to work abroad is a home fighting to keep the fabric of family intact.
Loretta has three kids, the youngest of whom, Ivy, was two years old when she left; Abigail, the middle child, was four and J-R was six. Of the three, Loretta said Abigail takes to her the most. "Abigail is very straightforward like me," said Loretta with a rare giggle. "She has a strong personality. She hasn't yet decided on what she wants to do, which is fine. She's enjoying herself." Loretta glowed as she described her children, her smile radiant and enchanting.
J-R, her eldest, is sixteen and about to graduate from high school. "He's the MVP in his basketball league," she said proudly. Loretta said she intended to sign one last contract, which in Hong Kong runs for two years, but "J-R wants to study nautical engineering. He's a clever young man who deserves four years of training, which is expensive. So maybe two contracts and hopefully that's it."
Loretta's eyes shined widest as she described Ivy, her youngest, who is now 12 years old. "We called her Bilog when she was a baby because she was so chubby. The name stuck; I still call her Bilog today even though she is much slimmer. She's a very sweet girl who loves to sing. She has a beautiful voice; I have tapes of Ivy singing. I often play her tapes at night. She's my antibiotic. Some nights, when sadness is overwhelming, I call up Ivy and ask her to sing for me and then I'm okay."
Then Loretta fell silent and her eyes drifted away.
Loneliness is a furtive adversary. In Hong Kong, it has a certain velocity - it loiters around conversations and at night lingers in the space between the blanket and the bed sheet where the woman -- the mother, the daughter, the sister -- curls up and dreams of home.
* * *
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
TASK OF OUR TIMES: REMEMBER, REFUSE, RESIST
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
January 5, 2004
Daybreak. The opening verse. The first week of the first month of a new year.
What will the rest of it bring? Another epidemic of hostilities on top of the current plague? Who's to know?
"While [we] are trying to put out a fire on one side of the Earth, another fire inevitably begins to rage up from the sparks and tinder of history neglected," said Kenneth Champeon.
Without memory, the motivation behind the deeds of men can be terribly inscrutable.
A hundred years ago on January 5, the Wright brothers stated to the Associated Press that they had achieved their goal with the Kitty Hawk flights: "We packed our goods and returned home, knowing that the age of the flying machine had come at last." Powered flight - an idea, eulogized the US government, "born of dreams [and] inspired by freedom." A year later, when asked what the purpose of their machine was, Wilbur Wright answered simply, "War."
Born of dreams but freedom was not the inspiration. According to George Monbiot, as soon as the Wright Brothers were confident that their craft worked, they "approached the war offices of several nations, hoping to sell their patent to the highest bidder. The US government bought it for $30,000, and started test bombing in 1910."
We hurtle towards the great unknown but we are not alone; the past is present. We are accompanied by the old hopes of wise folks who preferred the path that did not lead to oblivion.
Let the blind lead the blind.
Helen Keller, blind and deaf and childhood emblem. Disneyfied and handicapped by history to be forever extolled solely for overcoming her physical handicaps and not for her soaring spirit. "Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder... Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction!" said Keller to the working women and men assembled in Carnegie Hall in 1916, the year before the US entered the European war.
Keller, who abhorred those she called "socially blind and deaf" who defended "an intolerable system." Keller, the visionary who speaks to us today: "Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!"
As with J.R.R. Tolkien; he speaks to us too.
Celebrated author, creator of Middle Earth, he disliked the notion propounded by some of his readers that The Lord of the Rings was more than just "a story of what happened in B.C. year X, and it just happened to people who were like that!" He especially detested attempts to use his work as an allegory to cloak as "forces of good" wars waged by whichever side on another.
Yet Tolkien himself had to admit to the poet W.H. Auden that what he created was also a moral narrative, that although "the historical period is imaginary," the "theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we live."
"[M]y story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for domination)," wrote Tolkien in 1956. "Nuclear physics can be used for that purpose. But they need not be. They need not be used at all... If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false. The greatest examples of the action of the spirit and of reason are in abnegation."
The power to deny deadly power. The power of refusal.
Governments holding the mightiest of arsenals quake in the face of such power. A power discovered by 100,000 deserters in the US army during its war on Vietnam. A power wielded last month by over 30 Israeli refuseniks - officers of Israel's air force, the most revered branch of the Israeli military - who denounced the Palestinian occupation as eating at the moral fabric of Israel. The refuseniks who said they would no longer carry out illegal orders to bomb Palestinian cities.
The power held by Mordechai Vanunu, who chose to tell the world in 1986 that Israel was the greatest threat to the Middle East, that it had clandestinely created a stockpile of over 200 nuclear weapons. An act of conscience for which he was punished by craven men with 18 years of incarceration. Vanunu has spent over 11 of those years in complete isolation; this year is his 18th in prison.
Israel is the world's sixth largest nuclear power yet neither the Dimona nuclear weapons factory, which Vanunu exposed, nor Israel's biological and chemical weapons factory in Nes Zion, are open to international inspection. And yet America, supposedly searching for weapons of mass destruction, persists in quarrying spider holes in Tikrit and Baghdad and perhaps soon in Tehran.
"It is a dangerous illusion to believe they [nuclear weapons] can be defensive," wrote Vanunu from his prison cell in Ashkelon. "Only peace between states can promise security."
Vanunu, a fallible man of flesh and blood like the rest of us and yet Israel, its insecurities the precis of its perfidies, quakes at his impending release. Trembles at the power Vanunu holds. The whistleblower who chose abnegation. The man who diagnosed what was wrong with the world in a poem he wrote in prison: "I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don't look left or right, don't read the text. Don't look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp." A salve and slavery Vanunu would refuse.
Vanunu's vile 18-year prison sentence will end this April - the month the world celebrates Earth Day. What better way to show our planetary affections than to ensure the freedom of Mordechai Vanunu? He will soon be free. Let us all head to the Embassy of Israel and demand Vanunu's release. And the release of the Middle East as well from the nuclear weapons that Israel continues to store. We must make it so.
* * *
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
REFERENCES:
1. From "Lessons Unlearned: Gabriel Kolko's Anatomy of a War," Kenneth Champeon's review of Kolko's book.
2. http://www.nasm.si.edu/wrightbrothers/fly/1904/index.cfm
3. http://www.centennialofflight.gov/about/index.htm
4. George Monbiot, "A weapon with wings," The Guardian, December 16, 2003.
5. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1981. Tolkien also wrote, interestingly, "I am not a 'democrat' only because 'humility' and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power - and then we get and are getting slavery."
6. Passionate Declarations: Essays on war and justice, Howard Zinn, Pantheon Books, 2003.
7. "'We're air force pilots, not mafia. We don't take revenge'," Chris McGreal, The Guardian-UK, December 3, 2003.
8. "Anniversary of a whistle blower," Renato Redentor Constantino, TODAY, October 6, 2003.
9. "Israel Is Concerned About Whistleblower," Gavin Rabinowitz, Associated Press, December 30, 2003.
10. For the best background concerning the famed whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, see http://www.vanunu.freeserve.co.uk/
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
January 5, 2004
Daybreak. The opening verse. The first week of the first month of a new year.
What will the rest of it bring? Another epidemic of hostilities on top of the current plague? Who's to know?
"While [we] are trying to put out a fire on one side of the Earth, another fire inevitably begins to rage up from the sparks and tinder of history neglected," said Kenneth Champeon.
Without memory, the motivation behind the deeds of men can be terribly inscrutable.
A hundred years ago on January 5, the Wright brothers stated to the Associated Press that they had achieved their goal with the Kitty Hawk flights: "We packed our goods and returned home, knowing that the age of the flying machine had come at last." Powered flight - an idea, eulogized the US government, "born of dreams [and] inspired by freedom." A year later, when asked what the purpose of their machine was, Wilbur Wright answered simply, "War."
Born of dreams but freedom was not the inspiration. According to George Monbiot, as soon as the Wright Brothers were confident that their craft worked, they "approached the war offices of several nations, hoping to sell their patent to the highest bidder. The US government bought it for $30,000, and started test bombing in 1910."
We hurtle towards the great unknown but we are not alone; the past is present. We are accompanied by the old hopes of wise folks who preferred the path that did not lead to oblivion.
Let the blind lead the blind.
Helen Keller, blind and deaf and childhood emblem. Disneyfied and handicapped by history to be forever extolled solely for overcoming her physical handicaps and not for her soaring spirit. "Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder... Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction!" said Keller to the working women and men assembled in Carnegie Hall in 1916, the year before the US entered the European war.
Keller, who abhorred those she called "socially blind and deaf" who defended "an intolerable system." Keller, the visionary who speaks to us today: "Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!"
As with J.R.R. Tolkien; he speaks to us too.
Celebrated author, creator of Middle Earth, he disliked the notion propounded by some of his readers that The Lord of the Rings was more than just "a story of what happened in B.C. year X, and it just happened to people who were like that!" He especially detested attempts to use his work as an allegory to cloak as "forces of good" wars waged by whichever side on another.
Yet Tolkien himself had to admit to the poet W.H. Auden that what he created was also a moral narrative, that although "the historical period is imaginary," the "theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we live."
"[M]y story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for domination)," wrote Tolkien in 1956. "Nuclear physics can be used for that purpose. But they need not be. They need not be used at all... If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false. The greatest examples of the action of the spirit and of reason are in abnegation."
The power to deny deadly power. The power of refusal.
Governments holding the mightiest of arsenals quake in the face of such power. A power discovered by 100,000 deserters in the US army during its war on Vietnam. A power wielded last month by over 30 Israeli refuseniks - officers of Israel's air force, the most revered branch of the Israeli military - who denounced the Palestinian occupation as eating at the moral fabric of Israel. The refuseniks who said they would no longer carry out illegal orders to bomb Palestinian cities.
The power held by Mordechai Vanunu, who chose to tell the world in 1986 that Israel was the greatest threat to the Middle East, that it had clandestinely created a stockpile of over 200 nuclear weapons. An act of conscience for which he was punished by craven men with 18 years of incarceration. Vanunu has spent over 11 of those years in complete isolation; this year is his 18th in prison.
Israel is the world's sixth largest nuclear power yet neither the Dimona nuclear weapons factory, which Vanunu exposed, nor Israel's biological and chemical weapons factory in Nes Zion, are open to international inspection. And yet America, supposedly searching for weapons of mass destruction, persists in quarrying spider holes in Tikrit and Baghdad and perhaps soon in Tehran.
"It is a dangerous illusion to believe they [nuclear weapons] can be defensive," wrote Vanunu from his prison cell in Ashkelon. "Only peace between states can promise security."
Vanunu, a fallible man of flesh and blood like the rest of us and yet Israel, its insecurities the precis of its perfidies, quakes at his impending release. Trembles at the power Vanunu holds. The whistleblower who chose abnegation. The man who diagnosed what was wrong with the world in a poem he wrote in prison: "I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don't look left or right, don't read the text. Don't look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp." A salve and slavery Vanunu would refuse.
Vanunu's vile 18-year prison sentence will end this April - the month the world celebrates Earth Day. What better way to show our planetary affections than to ensure the freedom of Mordechai Vanunu? He will soon be free. Let us all head to the Embassy of Israel and demand Vanunu's release. And the release of the Middle East as well from the nuclear weapons that Israel continues to store. We must make it so.
* * *
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
REFERENCES:
1. From "Lessons Unlearned: Gabriel Kolko's Anatomy of a War," Kenneth Champeon's review of Kolko's book.
2. http://www.nasm.si.edu/wrightbrothers/fly/1904/index.cfm
3. http://www.centennialofflight.gov/about/index.htm
4. George Monbiot, "A weapon with wings," The Guardian, December 16, 2003.
5. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1981. Tolkien also wrote, interestingly, "I am not a 'democrat' only because 'humility' and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power - and then we get and are getting slavery."
6. Passionate Declarations: Essays on war and justice, Howard Zinn, Pantheon Books, 2003.
7. "'We're air force pilots, not mafia. We don't take revenge'," Chris McGreal, The Guardian-UK, December 3, 2003.
8. "Anniversary of a whistle blower," Renato Redentor Constantino, TODAY, October 6, 2003.
9. "Israel Is Concerned About Whistleblower," Gavin Rabinowitz, Associated Press, December 30, 2003.
10. For the best background concerning the famed whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, see http://www.vanunu.freeserve.co.uk/
Monday, December 22, 2003
THE MARATHON OF ERMA GEOLAMIN
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
December 26, 2004
At thirty five years of age, Erma Geolamin took her first step. Erma has been walking non-stop for 5,000 days and she is tired. She wonders if someday someone will ever tell her where the finish line is.
Erma is a Filipina migrant worker, a foreign domestic help for 14 years.
Erma left her country to work overseas in 1990, the year Nora Aunor swept Philippine film awards for best actress for the movie Andrea, Paano Ba ang Maging Isang Ina?
The same La Aunor who would play Flor Contemplacion five years later in a film about the tragic life of the Filipina domestic worker hanged in Singapore whose death “came to symbolize the millions of Filipinos driven by poverty to leave their families and take their chances abroad.” (1)
Erma comes from the Philippines, a curious country that rewards those it calls heroes -- Filipino migrant workers whose remittances alone keep the country’s economy afloat -- with a guarantee that their children will suffer the same fate they have suffered.
Each year, Filipinos working abroad remit billions of dollars to the Philippines. And each year, the Philippine government dutifully sets aside a third of the national budget to pay off gargantuan debts most of which had been incurred by crooks and thieving corporations and have done little to improve the public’s plight except to line the pockets of robber-banks and corrupt officials.
Of the 8 million overseas Filipino workers today, 130,000 are in Hong Kong working as domestic help. Erma Geolamin is one of them.
Erma’s youngest son Romir was still an infant when she left for Malaysia, her first overseas stint.
It was hard work but the pay, which was a pittance compared to her toil, was nonetheless far more than what she would have made if she had chosen to eke out a living in her hometown of Guimbal, Iloilo. Yet the costs that Erma had been made to shoulder were inestimable.
By the time Erma had saved enough to return to the Philippines after her first overseas job -- by the time she got to see her youngest son again, Erma was 39 and Romir was already four years old. And within weeks, Erma was already flying to Hong Kong where the pay for domestic help was said to be higher. And in Hong Kong she has stayed.
I met Erma at the majestic 7th floor Hong Kong residence she was tending on Conduit Road. We had tea and a lively exchange; Erma is very articulate in English and Filipino but her face communicated more. Wry and stoic expressions when she talked about the scars that marked the souls of domestic help working in Hong Kong; glittering eyes when talk shifted to her family.
For all the 14 years that Erma has spent as a domestic help, she has only seen her family eight times in periods lasting no more than two weeks. She would rather save the airfare for her kids, she said. A familiar story.
In 1999 she went home unannounced and caught her husband with another woman and discovered that he had squandered the earnings she had been sending home. Another familiar story.
“It’s like the relationship between overseas Filipino workers and the Philippine government,” I mumbled to myself. Erma nodded, her expression alert.
“I wept that day. And days after I still wept, but quietly. It was hard but I had to control my anger,” she said, her rage overpowered only by a sadness that would wash over her again and again. Erma prayed for strength as she wept and helped her children -- and herself -- make sense of decisions that had to be made. It was a measure of the stoutness of Erma’s spirit that she permitted her husband to accompany her to the airport. Before she boarded the plane bound for Hong Kong, holding back welling melancholy, she told him gently, “This is the last time we will see each other like this. From now on, you can no longer call me wife. You are no longer my husband.”
Her eyes had drifted far away as she finished recounting the episode but she sensed that I had noticed this and with a tilt of her head a smile radiated from her face. Erma’s eyes are like La Aunor’s -- they are beautiful and they speak.
Unlike the kitchens and bedrooms and toilets she has cleaned each day in Hong Kong for 10 years, Erma had jurisdiction over her heartaches. A college graduate with a degree in business administration, her body has been ravaged by backbreaking, mind-numbing domestic work. Erma said she thanks the Lord for blessing her with discipline, for keeping her strong despite her advancing age so that she could continue working for a few more years.
“I have to keep myself healthy, you know. I want all my children to finish school. I think of them every day,” said Erma, who will be turning 50 soon.
She has been walking for 14 years and has spent almost a third of her life in a perverse race that has no prize save for crossing the finishing line. Some nights, before she nods off to sleep, Erma tries to imagine what the finish line would look like.
Someday, she said, she hopes someone will point it to her.
At the back of her mind, she keeps at bay the fear that some of her children may yet join the wicked marathon that she had no choice but to accept. And so Erma is already thinking, at 50 years of age, of one more two-year contract, perhaps a second contract, or a third.
For the government, she is one among many modern-day serfs “to be deployed.” But for some, she is Erma Geolamin, the mother of all our children.
And yet that is only half of her story.
* * *
COMMENTS welcome at redcosmo(at)gmail(dot)com
------
1. “A death in the family,” Asiaweek, December 29, 1995.
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
December 26, 2004
At thirty five years of age, Erma Geolamin took her first step. Erma has been walking non-stop for 5,000 days and she is tired. She wonders if someday someone will ever tell her where the finish line is.
Erma is a Filipina migrant worker, a foreign domestic help for 14 years.
Erma left her country to work overseas in 1990, the year Nora Aunor swept Philippine film awards for best actress for the movie Andrea, Paano Ba ang Maging Isang Ina?
The same La Aunor who would play Flor Contemplacion five years later in a film about the tragic life of the Filipina domestic worker hanged in Singapore whose death “came to symbolize the millions of Filipinos driven by poverty to leave their families and take their chances abroad.” (1)
Erma comes from the Philippines, a curious country that rewards those it calls heroes -- Filipino migrant workers whose remittances alone keep the country’s economy afloat -- with a guarantee that their children will suffer the same fate they have suffered.
Each year, Filipinos working abroad remit billions of dollars to the Philippines. And each year, the Philippine government dutifully sets aside a third of the national budget to pay off gargantuan debts most of which had been incurred by crooks and thieving corporations and have done little to improve the public’s plight except to line the pockets of robber-banks and corrupt officials.
Of the 8 million overseas Filipino workers today, 130,000 are in Hong Kong working as domestic help. Erma Geolamin is one of them.
Erma’s youngest son Romir was still an infant when she left for Malaysia, her first overseas stint.
It was hard work but the pay, which was a pittance compared to her toil, was nonetheless far more than what she would have made if she had chosen to eke out a living in her hometown of Guimbal, Iloilo. Yet the costs that Erma had been made to shoulder were inestimable.
By the time Erma had saved enough to return to the Philippines after her first overseas job -- by the time she got to see her youngest son again, Erma was 39 and Romir was already four years old. And within weeks, Erma was already flying to Hong Kong where the pay for domestic help was said to be higher. And in Hong Kong she has stayed.
I met Erma at the majestic 7th floor Hong Kong residence she was tending on Conduit Road. We had tea and a lively exchange; Erma is very articulate in English and Filipino but her face communicated more. Wry and stoic expressions when she talked about the scars that marked the souls of domestic help working in Hong Kong; glittering eyes when talk shifted to her family.
For all the 14 years that Erma has spent as a domestic help, she has only seen her family eight times in periods lasting no more than two weeks. She would rather save the airfare for her kids, she said. A familiar story.
In 1999 she went home unannounced and caught her husband with another woman and discovered that he had squandered the earnings she had been sending home. Another familiar story.
“It’s like the relationship between overseas Filipino workers and the Philippine government,” I mumbled to myself. Erma nodded, her expression alert.
“I wept that day. And days after I still wept, but quietly. It was hard but I had to control my anger,” she said, her rage overpowered only by a sadness that would wash over her again and again. Erma prayed for strength as she wept and helped her children -- and herself -- make sense of decisions that had to be made. It was a measure of the stoutness of Erma’s spirit that she permitted her husband to accompany her to the airport. Before she boarded the plane bound for Hong Kong, holding back welling melancholy, she told him gently, “This is the last time we will see each other like this. From now on, you can no longer call me wife. You are no longer my husband.”
Her eyes had drifted far away as she finished recounting the episode but she sensed that I had noticed this and with a tilt of her head a smile radiated from her face. Erma’s eyes are like La Aunor’s -- they are beautiful and they speak.
Unlike the kitchens and bedrooms and toilets she has cleaned each day in Hong Kong for 10 years, Erma had jurisdiction over her heartaches. A college graduate with a degree in business administration, her body has been ravaged by backbreaking, mind-numbing domestic work. Erma said she thanks the Lord for blessing her with discipline, for keeping her strong despite her advancing age so that she could continue working for a few more years.
“I have to keep myself healthy, you know. I want all my children to finish school. I think of them every day,” said Erma, who will be turning 50 soon.
She has been walking for 14 years and has spent almost a third of her life in a perverse race that has no prize save for crossing the finishing line. Some nights, before she nods off to sleep, Erma tries to imagine what the finish line would look like.
Someday, she said, she hopes someone will point it to her.
At the back of her mind, she keeps at bay the fear that some of her children may yet join the wicked marathon that she had no choice but to accept. And so Erma is already thinking, at 50 years of age, of one more two-year contract, perhaps a second contract, or a third.
For the government, she is one among many modern-day serfs “to be deployed.” But for some, she is Erma Geolamin, the mother of all our children.
And yet that is only half of her story.
* * *
COMMENTS welcome at redcosmo(at)gmail(dot)com
------
1. “A death in the family,” Asiaweek, December 29, 1995.
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
MEMORANDUM TO EMPIRE
Assembly of Corsairs -- esteemed Pirates of America, Britain and Australia -- we appreciate your generous counsel. We are in agreement with you that the shadow of terror and tyranny grows longer by the day and that we must meet this growing threat with sustained ardor.
However, despite all the benefits that are said to come with it, we must respectfully decline your invitation for us to join the new crusade – what you call the ‘war on terror.’
Your offer of support is sincerely appreciated, even though the blandishments in your missive suggest that you need our support more than we need yours. While your proposal of deepened friendship given our perilous times is positively noted, you will have to forgive us if we can only extend our middle finger in return. The kindnesses you have heaped on the hapless are not forgotten so easily.
We have not forgotten that when martial law was declared in the Philippines in 1972, the first group to congratulate the despot Marcos came from a branch of your assembly called the American Chamber of Commerce, which called the declaration of martial rule a “heaven-sent relief.”
In its congratulatory telegram, we recall that the Chamber – the same one which exhorted the Philippines recently to “Remember, foreign investors go where they are most welcome” – wished the tyrant “every success in your endeavor to restore peace and order, business confidence, economic growth and the well-being of the Filipino people.”
We are very much aware that two years before martial law, US investments in the Philippines stood at $16.3 million, and that by 1981, the figure had grown to $920 million.” We can even recall George H.W. Bush raising his glass in a toast as he told Marcos during his visit to Manila in 1981, "We love your adherence to democratic principle and to the democratic processes.”
Pirates, gentlemen and ladies, when your current leader, George Bush, Jr., said he chose to travel to Southeast Asia this year because he wanted “to make sure that people … finally understand our motivation is pure,” he did not have to explain himself too much. The purity of his intentions was never in doubt.
We have not forgotten the kindnesses that the band he belongs to – your band – heaped on Indonesia.
We have not forgotten the mass graves buried near the holiday hotels in Bali. Graves that hold the remains of some 80,000 people murdered in Bali during the bloodletting of 1965-66, which claimed a total of a million lives across Indonesia.
We recall the slaughter being described by the CIA as “One of the worst mass murders in the 20th century” and recall that the evil deed was perpetrated by a butcher called Suharto with the connivance of the so-called Western democracies (another name of your august Assembly). We have not overlooked the fact that this Suharto was called by corsair extraordinaire Margaret Thatcher as “one of our very best and most valuable friends.”
Wasn’t it a member of yours, Harold Holt, the Australian Prime Minister in 1966, who remarked “With 500,000 to a million communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it’s safe to assume a reorientation has taken place”? It appears to be him. We do recall that at the time of Holt’s remark, the Australian embassy in Jakarta described Suharto’s massacres “as a ‘cleansing process’” while in Canberra, “the Prime Minister’s department expressed support for ‘any measures to assist the Indonesian army cope with the internal situation.’”
We are unsure if Australia did “lose its innocence” in the Bali bombing of October 2002; it is possible the innocence died much earlier.
Esteemed pirates, please do not think we have forgotten about the kindness of silence that was extended to East Timor when it was invaded on December 7, 1975 and occupied for over two decades by Suharto’s armed forces. And do not think that we have neglected the fact that for much of the ghastly occupation of East Timor, “Suharto’s biggest supplier of arms and military equipment was Britain.”
We know that US President Gerald Ford and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with Suharto in Jakarta the day before the invasion of East Timor. And though both these chaps kept denying it once upon a time, based on recently declassified secret archival documents, it is now an indisputable fact that Ford and Kissinger advised Suharto in their meeting that “it is important that whatever you do [with East Timor] succeeds quickly” but that “it would be better if it were done after we [have left].”
We of course remember, esteemed Pirates, that the Indonesian dictator tried to keep his word. By the time Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor had commenced, Ford and Kissinger were already safely meeting with Marcos in Manila, spiritedly plotting how to recover from the humiliation suffered by the US that year – 1975 -- the year America fled from Saigon.
But Pirates do not learn their lessons well, as we have observed.
By 1979, “the first directive for secret aid” had already been signed by US President Jimmy Carter – the first of many that would in time merge into a massive river of financing -- to groups fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Groups that would later form the Taliban. And the Abu Sayyaf. And Jemaah Islamiyah. Among others.
What goes around comes around.
Didn’t former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzenzinski hector to a French newspaper in 1998, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred up Moslems or … the end of the cold war?”
Some stirred up Moslems did try to answer Brzezinski’s interesting question three years later on September 11. Who can forget that wicked deed – and those men? The men who could not scale the heights of their hatred?
Pirates, we wish to make ourselves clear: while we repudiate the barbarism of the men who conspired and executed the terror of 9/11, we do not intend to follow you into your abyss.
We little people, we are stubborn folks and we prefer to follow our own course.
*****
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Op-Ed, TODAY
Assembly of Corsairs -- esteemed Pirates of America, Britain and Australia -- we appreciate your generous counsel. We are in agreement with you that the shadow of terror and tyranny grows longer by the day and that we must meet this growing threat with sustained ardor.
However, despite all the benefits that are said to come with it, we must respectfully decline your invitation for us to join the new crusade – what you call the ‘war on terror.’
Your offer of support is sincerely appreciated, even though the blandishments in your missive suggest that you need our support more than we need yours. While your proposal of deepened friendship given our perilous times is positively noted, you will have to forgive us if we can only extend our middle finger in return. The kindnesses you have heaped on the hapless are not forgotten so easily.
We have not forgotten that when martial law was declared in the Philippines in 1972, the first group to congratulate the despot Marcos came from a branch of your assembly called the American Chamber of Commerce, which called the declaration of martial rule a “heaven-sent relief.”
In its congratulatory telegram, we recall that the Chamber – the same one which exhorted the Philippines recently to “Remember, foreign investors go where they are most welcome” – wished the tyrant “every success in your endeavor to restore peace and order, business confidence, economic growth and the well-being of the Filipino people.”
We are very much aware that two years before martial law, US investments in the Philippines stood at $16.3 million, and that by 1981, the figure had grown to $920 million.” We can even recall George H.W. Bush raising his glass in a toast as he told Marcos during his visit to Manila in 1981, "We love your adherence to democratic principle and to the democratic processes.”
Pirates, gentlemen and ladies, when your current leader, George Bush, Jr., said he chose to travel to Southeast Asia this year because he wanted “to make sure that people … finally understand our motivation is pure,” he did not have to explain himself too much. The purity of his intentions was never in doubt.
We have not forgotten the kindnesses that the band he belongs to – your band – heaped on Indonesia.
We have not forgotten the mass graves buried near the holiday hotels in Bali. Graves that hold the remains of some 80,000 people murdered in Bali during the bloodletting of 1965-66, which claimed a total of a million lives across Indonesia.
We recall the slaughter being described by the CIA as “One of the worst mass murders in the 20th century” and recall that the evil deed was perpetrated by a butcher called Suharto with the connivance of the so-called Western democracies (another name of your august Assembly). We have not overlooked the fact that this Suharto was called by corsair extraordinaire Margaret Thatcher as “one of our very best and most valuable friends.”
Wasn’t it a member of yours, Harold Holt, the Australian Prime Minister in 1966, who remarked “With 500,000 to a million communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it’s safe to assume a reorientation has taken place”? It appears to be him. We do recall that at the time of Holt’s remark, the Australian embassy in Jakarta described Suharto’s massacres “as a ‘cleansing process’” while in Canberra, “the Prime Minister’s department expressed support for ‘any measures to assist the Indonesian army cope with the internal situation.’”
We are unsure if Australia did “lose its innocence” in the Bali bombing of October 2002; it is possible the innocence died much earlier.
Esteemed pirates, please do not think we have forgotten about the kindness of silence that was extended to East Timor when it was invaded on December 7, 1975 and occupied for over two decades by Suharto’s armed forces. And do not think that we have neglected the fact that for much of the ghastly occupation of East Timor, “Suharto’s biggest supplier of arms and military equipment was Britain.”
We know that US President Gerald Ford and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with Suharto in Jakarta the day before the invasion of East Timor. And though both these chaps kept denying it once upon a time, based on recently declassified secret archival documents, it is now an indisputable fact that Ford and Kissinger advised Suharto in their meeting that “it is important that whatever you do [with East Timor] succeeds quickly” but that “it would be better if it were done after we [have left].”
We of course remember, esteemed Pirates, that the Indonesian dictator tried to keep his word. By the time Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor had commenced, Ford and Kissinger were already safely meeting with Marcos in Manila, spiritedly plotting how to recover from the humiliation suffered by the US that year – 1975 -- the year America fled from Saigon.
But Pirates do not learn their lessons well, as we have observed.
By 1979, “the first directive for secret aid” had already been signed by US President Jimmy Carter – the first of many that would in time merge into a massive river of financing -- to groups fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Groups that would later form the Taliban. And the Abu Sayyaf. And Jemaah Islamiyah. Among others.
What goes around comes around.
Didn’t former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzenzinski hector to a French newspaper in 1998, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred up Moslems or … the end of the cold war?”
Some stirred up Moslems did try to answer Brzezinski’s interesting question three years later on September 11. Who can forget that wicked deed – and those men? The men who could not scale the heights of their hatred?
Pirates, we wish to make ourselves clear: while we repudiate the barbarism of the men who conspired and executed the terror of 9/11, we do not intend to follow you into your abyss.
We little people, we are stubborn folks and we prefer to follow our own course.
*****
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Op-Ed, TODAY
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
REMEMBRANCE OF DECEMBERS PAST
It is the beginning of the last month of 2003 – the year America invaded and occupied Iraq.
Welcome, December, month of solace and tribulation. You remind us of many things.
The great Janis Joplin made her final appearance with Big Brother and the Holding Company on December 1, 1968. On the same day in 1957, Buddy Holly and the Crickets made their debut on the Ed Sullivan Show with "That'll Be the Day."
On December 1, 1904, the grand St. Louis World’s Fair in Missouri, USA came to a close.
The World’s Fair was designed to showcase to Americans the fruits of their country’s unbridled progress. On one side of the fair, astonishing technological exhibits and feats of scientific prowess. On the other, displays of the subjugated people of America's recent past.
"[A] practical illustration,” as one fair organizer described it, “of the best way of bearing the white man's burden," referring to Rudyard Kipling’s infamous poem “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands,” which called on America to enter the imperial stage alongside the terminally tottering British empire.
On display were exhibits showing America’s Negro slaves and bucolic plantation life, exhibits of American Indians, and the Philippine Exposition – one of the largest and most popular exhibits showing abducted Filipino “savages” – which “gave Americans a chance to see the people they had recently conquered.”
A sampling of “Your new-caught sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child,” as Kipling described the natives of the Philippines -- before they were moved up the evolutionary tree thanks to America's civilizing presence. That’ll be the day.
While the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair was a story of racial supremacy intended “to rationalize deep social divisions in a society that proclaimed its belief in equality,” it was also an imperial narrative that sought to make the link “between Manifest Destiny on the home front, and America's burgeoning drive to expand overseas.”
Welcome, December, month of comfort. Make us remember.
International Human Rights day falls on December 10 – the day the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948.
UDHR – the badly dented armor crafted to protect the world from tyrants, agents of wickedness and aggressor nations.
Welcome, December, month of transgressions; help us make the needed links.
Exactly fifty years before the passage of the UDHR, on December 10, 1898, representatives of Spain and the United States signed the Treaty of Peace in Paris.
The Treaty of Paris gave disgraced colonialist Spain the peace of $20,000,000 – courtesy of America’s coffers. And through the Treaty, America acquired the Philippines along with Spain’s other “possessions.”
Peace for the predators; slaughter for the prey.
America chose an opportune time to enter the stage. At the time of the signing of the Paris “Peace” Treaty, the Spanish colonial regime was already crumbling, battered by the offensives hurled by Filipino revolutionaries who were already setting up the first republic in Asia.
But this mattered little to the new empire determined to claim new territories. And so by the time of the actual conclusion of America’s brutal pacification campaign in the Philippines, a quarter of a million Filipinos – some estimates reaching up to a million – had been killed or had died of disease as a result of the US occupation.
So savage was America’s imperial army in the Philippines that the normal casualty statistics of war experienced a horrific reversal. According to figures made available to the US Congress during the Filipino-American War, “US troops killed fifteen times as many Filipinos as they wounded.”
A sample: Report for April, May, June and July, 1900 of Major-General Wheaton, commander of US forces in Northern Luzon (whose people the US government said “received us with open arms”): Filipinos killed, 1,014; Filipinos wounded, 95.
“People do not need to be taught so much as they need to be reminded," wrote Kenneth Champeon, paraphrasing Samuel Johnson.
Reminded, perhaps, of other Decembers such as December 21, 1898 – the day US President William McKinley issued the infamous Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation which instructed the American army to forcibly impose American sovereignty over the Philippines.
“[W]e come, not as invaders and conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives,” said McKinley as mighty imperial America prepared to destroy the fledgling Philippine Republic.
Familiar words. The British virtually spluttered the same rhetorical poison when they entered Baghdad in 1917. As did the Bush administration when its forces penetrated the Iraqi capital just months ago.
Remember Mr. Mission Accomplished waving onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln last May 1, 2003 – waving in front of a backdrop made by the Whitehouse declaring, well, “Mission Accomplished”?
So painfully familiar.
The US still officially views the end of Filipino-American hostilities on the date President Theodore Roosevelt issued his “Proclamation Ending the Philippine-American War” on July 4, 1902 even though armed resistance to American rule continued well beyond the first decade of the 20th century.
In fact, right after Roosevelt’s own “mission accomplished” proclamation, the “Brigandage Act” was imposed on the Philippines. An act which classified resistance to US rule as “banditry” and which caused the hanging of Filipino heroes such as Macario Sakay, who was part of the revolt against Spain and whose forces -- years after Roosevelt’s proclamation -- continued to resist American occupation.
By 1903, US military operations had commenced against Muslim Filipinos “aimed at exerting full U.S. control over the southern islands.” “Full US control” being equal to America’s earlier definition of “peace” for the Philippines: in March 1906, in one its infamous massacres, US troops fired upon and slaughtered 900 Filipinos – 900 men, women and children who had sought refuge in a volcanic crater on the southern Philippine island of Jolo.
A feat – not a horror – that did not go unnoticed by President Roosevelt, who immediately commended the general who had led the Jolo massacre: “I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.”
Support the troops.
“Take up the White Man’s burden-- / In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror / And check the show of pride.” Remember Rudyard Kipling’s poem?
Remember Kipling – dead bard and worthy companion of an American empire still dreaming of new conquests.
Remember Kipling, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907 -- the year after the slaughter of Jolo. The Kipling who was born on December 30, 1865.
Let us begin the last month of a most turbulent year. Welcome, December. You remind us of many things.
---------------
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Op-Ed, TODAY
It is the beginning of the last month of 2003 – the year America invaded and occupied Iraq.
Welcome, December, month of solace and tribulation. You remind us of many things.
The great Janis Joplin made her final appearance with Big Brother and the Holding Company on December 1, 1968. On the same day in 1957, Buddy Holly and the Crickets made their debut on the Ed Sullivan Show with "That'll Be the Day."
On December 1, 1904, the grand St. Louis World’s Fair in Missouri, USA came to a close.
The World’s Fair was designed to showcase to Americans the fruits of their country’s unbridled progress. On one side of the fair, astonishing technological exhibits and feats of scientific prowess. On the other, displays of the subjugated people of America's recent past.
"[A] practical illustration,” as one fair organizer described it, “of the best way of bearing the white man's burden," referring to Rudyard Kipling’s infamous poem “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands,” which called on America to enter the imperial stage alongside the terminally tottering British empire.
On display were exhibits showing America’s Negro slaves and bucolic plantation life, exhibits of American Indians, and the Philippine Exposition – one of the largest and most popular exhibits showing abducted Filipino “savages” – which “gave Americans a chance to see the people they had recently conquered.”
A sampling of “Your new-caught sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child,” as Kipling described the natives of the Philippines -- before they were moved up the evolutionary tree thanks to America's civilizing presence. That’ll be the day.
While the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair was a story of racial supremacy intended “to rationalize deep social divisions in a society that proclaimed its belief in equality,” it was also an imperial narrative that sought to make the link “between Manifest Destiny on the home front, and America's burgeoning drive to expand overseas.”
Welcome, December, month of comfort. Make us remember.
International Human Rights day falls on December 10 – the day the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948.
UDHR – the badly dented armor crafted to protect the world from tyrants, agents of wickedness and aggressor nations.
Welcome, December, month of transgressions; help us make the needed links.
Exactly fifty years before the passage of the UDHR, on December 10, 1898, representatives of Spain and the United States signed the Treaty of Peace in Paris.
The Treaty of Paris gave disgraced colonialist Spain the peace of $20,000,000 – courtesy of America’s coffers. And through the Treaty, America acquired the Philippines along with Spain’s other “possessions.”
Peace for the predators; slaughter for the prey.
America chose an opportune time to enter the stage. At the time of the signing of the Paris “Peace” Treaty, the Spanish colonial regime was already crumbling, battered by the offensives hurled by Filipino revolutionaries who were already setting up the first republic in Asia.
But this mattered little to the new empire determined to claim new territories. And so by the time of the actual conclusion of America’s brutal pacification campaign in the Philippines, a quarter of a million Filipinos – some estimates reaching up to a million – had been killed or had died of disease as a result of the US occupation.
So savage was America’s imperial army in the Philippines that the normal casualty statistics of war experienced a horrific reversal. According to figures made available to the US Congress during the Filipino-American War, “US troops killed fifteen times as many Filipinos as they wounded.”
A sample: Report for April, May, June and July, 1900 of Major-General Wheaton, commander of US forces in Northern Luzon (whose people the US government said “received us with open arms”): Filipinos killed, 1,014; Filipinos wounded, 95.
“People do not need to be taught so much as they need to be reminded," wrote Kenneth Champeon, paraphrasing Samuel Johnson.
Reminded, perhaps, of other Decembers such as December 21, 1898 – the day US President William McKinley issued the infamous Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation which instructed the American army to forcibly impose American sovereignty over the Philippines.
“[W]e come, not as invaders and conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives,” said McKinley as mighty imperial America prepared to destroy the fledgling Philippine Republic.
Familiar words. The British virtually spluttered the same rhetorical poison when they entered Baghdad in 1917. As did the Bush administration when its forces penetrated the Iraqi capital just months ago.
Remember Mr. Mission Accomplished waving onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln last May 1, 2003 – waving in front of a backdrop made by the Whitehouse declaring, well, “Mission Accomplished”?
So painfully familiar.
The US still officially views the end of Filipino-American hostilities on the date President Theodore Roosevelt issued his “Proclamation Ending the Philippine-American War” on July 4, 1902 even though armed resistance to American rule continued well beyond the first decade of the 20th century.
In fact, right after Roosevelt’s own “mission accomplished” proclamation, the “Brigandage Act” was imposed on the Philippines. An act which classified resistance to US rule as “banditry” and which caused the hanging of Filipino heroes such as Macario Sakay, who was part of the revolt against Spain and whose forces -- years after Roosevelt’s proclamation -- continued to resist American occupation.
By 1903, US military operations had commenced against Muslim Filipinos “aimed at exerting full U.S. control over the southern islands.” “Full US control” being equal to America’s earlier definition of “peace” for the Philippines: in March 1906, in one its infamous massacres, US troops fired upon and slaughtered 900 Filipinos – 900 men, women and children who had sought refuge in a volcanic crater on the southern Philippine island of Jolo.
A feat – not a horror – that did not go unnoticed by President Roosevelt, who immediately commended the general who had led the Jolo massacre: “I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.”
Support the troops.
“Take up the White Man’s burden-- / In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror / And check the show of pride.” Remember Rudyard Kipling’s poem?
Remember Kipling – dead bard and worthy companion of an American empire still dreaming of new conquests.
Remember Kipling, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907 -- the year after the slaughter of Jolo. The Kipling who was born on December 30, 1865.
Let us begin the last month of a most turbulent year. Welcome, December. You remind us of many things.
---------------
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Op-Ed, TODAY
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
A LOOK AT CHINA'S FUTURE
It was all over the papers this morning, which of course went well with the coffee.
We had entered the 4,000-MW coal plant of CLP (China Light and Power) at Tap Shek Kok yesterday. Hung and unfurled between the smokestacks a huge banner almost the size of two double-deck buses. Rebranded CLP as “China’s Leading Polluter” and spoiled the release of the CLP executives preparing their annual glossy financial report.
Happy. Tired as well. Going home; miss my wife and our kids; thankfully oblivious of whatever the political squall of the week was in the Philippines.
The ride to Hong Kong international airport was a fitful one, the dull growl of the bus’s engine calming but of little help. Sleep was a slippery slope competing with restless glances at the window, at dissolving images of past days.
Shantou City, east Guangdong, November 14. The roll-on-roll-off ferry to Nan Ao had already left by the time our bus arrived and the next ferry was scheduled to arrive after two hours.
It was windy and cold and good friend Jean Francois suggested we have some breakfast. We sat down in one of the stalls and the Belgian, being a Belgian, bought some cereal -- a large bottle of Zhujiang beer, which was somehow edifying at 8:30 a.m. with salty olives.
Tonya from the US and Xiao Qing and Yen from Guangzhou later joined our table and ordered kung fu tea.
We went to the great Dan Nan wind farm of Nan Ao that day. A farm of towering white 600-kW tubular wind turbines planted along the ridges. Tall as buildings yet so graceful, effortlessly powerful and essential like Yao Ming of the Houston Rockets.More wind farms were visible near the point of Hou Garden (which of course reminded Jean Francois and I of Hoegaarden; the Belgian preferred Rochefort). A few with old lattice-work towers; most fitted with modern tubes. We knew we were looking at the future of China that day. One of its possible futures, at least, since the great majority of China’s power comes from coal, much of it fi nanced -- and will continue to be financed -- by the likes of the World Bank and the ADB, the leading emitters of environmental rhetoric.
On the way to Shantou, we were reminded of China’s mortal struggle with an icon of the past as we passed a small town surrounded by residential buildings and framed almost perfectly by an amphitheater of small ascending hills. In the middle of the town was a monstrous fat smokestack fifteen times higher than the buildings -- like a gigantic smoking missile that struck the ground but which never exploded.
Then Sunday, while still in the Mainland, a text message informing me of Joe Burgos’s death. I remember I had to sit down.
I was 13 years old and working as a copy boy for Malaya when I first met Joe Burgos, the fiery editor, publisher and icon of the Mosquito Press, which operated under constant intimidation from the despotic Marcos regime.
For virtually every storm that the dictator Marcos threw at the Philippine Republic, Burgos and his obstinate team hurled back their own typhoons.
Burgos was named one of the 50 Press Freedom Heroes by the International Press Institute in 2000, but he’s been a personal hero for some time.
I remember lighting bolts emanating from the man. Malaya was still on West Avenue then, a smoky dusty labyrinth of belligerence, dark humor and high purpose.
At least that was how it appeared to a 13-year-old who went to work daily on a BMX bike with a lunch box in his backpack who, after punching in his time card, would ferry dispatches, pencils and notes and memos from desk to desk to desk, in total fascination of the universe of the newsroom.
I grew up quickly and stayed young in Malaya, tolerated by pugnacious reporters and charmed by the warm companionship of its support staff. My wonder years. The truth is, excluding my name and date of birth, the only item that has remained constant on my résumé is -- Copy Boy, Malaya, 1983-84.”
I received the news of the death of Joe Burgos with a squint and a deep, deep sigh. A sense of foreboding stains the country each day. Who but a fool would deny that we live in troubled times?
While in Guangdong, I encountered again the Chinese saying which reminds us that the best time for planting trees is yesterday, and that the next best time is today. And I think of Burgos and his team, who planted their trees years ago, and wonder if enough saplings will be planted today to weather the coming storms.
The day Joe Burgos passed away marks the first birthday too of my sweet daughter, Yla Luna, named after her beautiful mother. Apart from roots and wings, we hope to leave with Luna the moral compass of Filipinos such as Joe Burgos in order that she may find her way when she grows up.
Hoping that she too may plant her trees one day.
-------------
Comments welcome at xioi@excite.com
Op-Ed, TODAY and abs-cbnnews.com
It was all over the papers this morning, which of course went well with the coffee.
We had entered the 4,000-MW coal plant of CLP (China Light and Power) at Tap Shek Kok yesterday. Hung and unfurled between the smokestacks a huge banner almost the size of two double-deck buses. Rebranded CLP as “China’s Leading Polluter” and spoiled the release of the CLP executives preparing their annual glossy financial report.
Happy. Tired as well. Going home; miss my wife and our kids; thankfully oblivious of whatever the political squall of the week was in the Philippines.
The ride to Hong Kong international airport was a fitful one, the dull growl of the bus’s engine calming but of little help. Sleep was a slippery slope competing with restless glances at the window, at dissolving images of past days.
Shantou City, east Guangdong, November 14. The roll-on-roll-off ferry to Nan Ao had already left by the time our bus arrived and the next ferry was scheduled to arrive after two hours.
It was windy and cold and good friend Jean Francois suggested we have some breakfast. We sat down in one of the stalls and the Belgian, being a Belgian, bought some cereal -- a large bottle of Zhujiang beer, which was somehow edifying at 8:30 a.m. with salty olives.
Tonya from the US and Xiao Qing and Yen from Guangzhou later joined our table and ordered kung fu tea.
We went to the great Dan Nan wind farm of Nan Ao that day. A farm of towering white 600-kW tubular wind turbines planted along the ridges. Tall as buildings yet so graceful, effortlessly powerful and essential like Yao Ming of the Houston Rockets.More wind farms were visible near the point of Hou Garden (which of course reminded Jean Francois and I of Hoegaarden; the Belgian preferred Rochefort). A few with old lattice-work towers; most fitted with modern tubes. We knew we were looking at the future of China that day. One of its possible futures, at least, since the great majority of China’s power comes from coal, much of it fi nanced -- and will continue to be financed -- by the likes of the World Bank and the ADB, the leading emitters of environmental rhetoric.
On the way to Shantou, we were reminded of China’s mortal struggle with an icon of the past as we passed a small town surrounded by residential buildings and framed almost perfectly by an amphitheater of small ascending hills. In the middle of the town was a monstrous fat smokestack fifteen times higher than the buildings -- like a gigantic smoking missile that struck the ground but which never exploded.
Then Sunday, while still in the Mainland, a text message informing me of Joe Burgos’s death. I remember I had to sit down.
I was 13 years old and working as a copy boy for Malaya when I first met Joe Burgos, the fiery editor, publisher and icon of the Mosquito Press, which operated under constant intimidation from the despotic Marcos regime.
For virtually every storm that the dictator Marcos threw at the Philippine Republic, Burgos and his obstinate team hurled back their own typhoons.
Burgos was named one of the 50 Press Freedom Heroes by the International Press Institute in 2000, but he’s been a personal hero for some time.
I remember lighting bolts emanating from the man. Malaya was still on West Avenue then, a smoky dusty labyrinth of belligerence, dark humor and high purpose.
At least that was how it appeared to a 13-year-old who went to work daily on a BMX bike with a lunch box in his backpack who, after punching in his time card, would ferry dispatches, pencils and notes and memos from desk to desk to desk, in total fascination of the universe of the newsroom.
I grew up quickly and stayed young in Malaya, tolerated by pugnacious reporters and charmed by the warm companionship of its support staff. My wonder years. The truth is, excluding my name and date of birth, the only item that has remained constant on my résumé is -- Copy Boy, Malaya, 1983-84.”
I received the news of the death of Joe Burgos with a squint and a deep, deep sigh. A sense of foreboding stains the country each day. Who but a fool would deny that we live in troubled times?
While in Guangdong, I encountered again the Chinese saying which reminds us that the best time for planting trees is yesterday, and that the next best time is today. And I think of Burgos and his team, who planted their trees years ago, and wonder if enough saplings will be planted today to weather the coming storms.
The day Joe Burgos passed away marks the first birthday too of my sweet daughter, Yla Luna, named after her beautiful mother. Apart from roots and wings, we hope to leave with Luna the moral compass of Filipinos such as Joe Burgos in order that she may find her way when she grows up.
Hoping that she too may plant her trees one day.
-------------
Comments welcome at xioi@excite.com
Op-Ed, TODAY and abs-cbnnews.com
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
TODAY ON NOVEMBER 10
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO, TODAY
What other wonders will this day reveal 10, 20, 30 years from now? In 1940, November 10 was reportedly the day when Walt Disney started as a secret informer for the Los Angeles office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. So. Mickey Mouse was a rat.
In his speech on November 10, 2001, US President Bush reminded the UN General Assembly of the founding principles of the United Nations without of course being aware of the implications of his words two years later. “We affirmed that some crimes are so terrible they offend humanity,” said Bush in his UN speech in 2001. “[W]e resolved that the aggressions and ambitions of the wicked must be opposed early, decisively, and collectively, before they threaten us all. That evil has returned.”
Indeed. It has returned.
“Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research,” said Malcolm X on November 10, 1963. “All you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. Once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight.” Malcolm X in 1963 was speaking about the black revolution in the US, the Cuban revolution and the revolutions in Asia against imperialism. The same year “Busted” by Ray Charles was given the Grammy for Best Rhythm and Blues and “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Peter, Paul and Mary the Grammy for Best Performance by a Vocal Group.
A year later, on November 10, 1964, US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara held a news conference where he said that everything was under control and that the United States had no plans to send combat troops to Vietnam.
By 1969, more than 500,000 American troops were in South Vietnam.
It brings to mind the unlamented demise today of the Bush administration’s “cake-walk” triumphalism. In lieu of the cake, US troops are being served presently with bombs, bullets and landmines.American troops are being attacked at least 35 times each day in the Baghdad area alone and Washington insists it has no intention of adding American troops in Iraq because of the happy progress that the US occupying army continues to make.
One single day and yet replete with so much to ponder on.
Like oil and dispossession.
November 10, 1975 -- the day the UN General Assembly approved a Resolution 3379 which equated Zionism with racism. A resolution which, by the way, recalled another UN measure -- passed on November 10, 1959, and directed at the regime in South Africa -- which condemned racial discrimination wherever it occurred.
Remember November 10, 1995 -- the day the Nigerian writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged by the brutal military dictatorship of Gen. Sani Abacha?
Saro-Wiwa was hanged along with eight other activists from the indigenous Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People for speaking out against the Abacha regime and the repugnant Dutch transnational oil company Shell, which had devastated the land of the Ogoni people because of its oil operations.
Shell Oil never intervened or denounced the hanging of Saro-Wiwa (may the world never forget its complicity) while US oil companies such as Chevron Texaco lobbied Washington intensively to maintain good relations with the Abacha regime despite the hanging.
A brochure from Mobil (now ExxonMobil) explaining the company’s tolerance of the human rights abuses of the Abacha dictatorship proclaims passionately “[W]e do not believe that cutting off relations or instituting trade sanctions or boycotts will achieve the desired result. In fact, such actions could cause Nigerians to resist and resent what may be seen as unfair meddling in the country’s political development by outsiders.”
So much disdain for meddling; so much concern for the political sensitivity of Nigerians.
Perhaps because Nigeria is the 7th largest producer of crude oil in the world and Abacha was America’s good buddy?
But November 10 need not remind us only of bad things.
Here’s a glowing one. The very first broadcast of Sesame Street, the children’s educational show, was on November 10th, 1969. In the show, Jim Henson’s fun-loving muppets, people, animals and imaginary friends lived together in a community that helped teach young children about numbers, letters and social values. Such a shame that by the time Sesame Street was first broadcast, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were already grown-up bullies.
Who knows, maybe the world would be a little less bad today if only these leaders grew up with Sesame Street.
Maybe George, Dick and Donald would have learned something.
Or maybe that’s asking too much of Big Bird, Ernie and Grover?
***
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO, TODAY
What other wonders will this day reveal 10, 20, 30 years from now? In 1940, November 10 was reportedly the day when Walt Disney started as a secret informer for the Los Angeles office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. So. Mickey Mouse was a rat.
In his speech on November 10, 2001, US President Bush reminded the UN General Assembly of the founding principles of the United Nations without of course being aware of the implications of his words two years later. “We affirmed that some crimes are so terrible they offend humanity,” said Bush in his UN speech in 2001. “[W]e resolved that the aggressions and ambitions of the wicked must be opposed early, decisively, and collectively, before they threaten us all. That evil has returned.”
Indeed. It has returned.
“Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research,” said Malcolm X on November 10, 1963. “All you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. Once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight.” Malcolm X in 1963 was speaking about the black revolution in the US, the Cuban revolution and the revolutions in Asia against imperialism. The same year “Busted” by Ray Charles was given the Grammy for Best Rhythm and Blues and “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Peter, Paul and Mary the Grammy for Best Performance by a Vocal Group.
A year later, on November 10, 1964, US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara held a news conference where he said that everything was under control and that the United States had no plans to send combat troops to Vietnam.
By 1969, more than 500,000 American troops were in South Vietnam.
It brings to mind the unlamented demise today of the Bush administration’s “cake-walk” triumphalism. In lieu of the cake, US troops are being served presently with bombs, bullets and landmines.American troops are being attacked at least 35 times each day in the Baghdad area alone and Washington insists it has no intention of adding American troops in Iraq because of the happy progress that the US occupying army continues to make.
One single day and yet replete with so much to ponder on.
Like oil and dispossession.
November 10, 1975 -- the day the UN General Assembly approved a Resolution 3379 which equated Zionism with racism. A resolution which, by the way, recalled another UN measure -- passed on November 10, 1959, and directed at the regime in South Africa -- which condemned racial discrimination wherever it occurred.
Remember November 10, 1995 -- the day the Nigerian writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged by the brutal military dictatorship of Gen. Sani Abacha?
Saro-Wiwa was hanged along with eight other activists from the indigenous Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People for speaking out against the Abacha regime and the repugnant Dutch transnational oil company Shell, which had devastated the land of the Ogoni people because of its oil operations.
Shell Oil never intervened or denounced the hanging of Saro-Wiwa (may the world never forget its complicity) while US oil companies such as Chevron Texaco lobbied Washington intensively to maintain good relations with the Abacha regime despite the hanging.
A brochure from Mobil (now ExxonMobil) explaining the company’s tolerance of the human rights abuses of the Abacha dictatorship proclaims passionately “[W]e do not believe that cutting off relations or instituting trade sanctions or boycotts will achieve the desired result. In fact, such actions could cause Nigerians to resist and resent what may be seen as unfair meddling in the country’s political development by outsiders.”
So much disdain for meddling; so much concern for the political sensitivity of Nigerians.
Perhaps because Nigeria is the 7th largest producer of crude oil in the world and Abacha was America’s good buddy?
But November 10 need not remind us only of bad things.
Here’s a glowing one. The very first broadcast of Sesame Street, the children’s educational show, was on November 10th, 1969. In the show, Jim Henson’s fun-loving muppets, people, animals and imaginary friends lived together in a community that helped teach young children about numbers, letters and social values. Such a shame that by the time Sesame Street was first broadcast, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were already grown-up bullies.
Who knows, maybe the world would be a little less bad today if only these leaders grew up with Sesame Street.
Maybe George, Dick and Donald would have learned something.
Or maybe that’s asking too much of Big Bird, Ernie and Grover?
***
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
TIME TO LISTEN TO AMERICANS
"We can see only a career of slaughter, of devastation and of decay; murder and rapine abroad, and disturbances and misery at home. Such has ever been the bloody course of empire,¡¨ wrote the Washington Anti-Imperialist League prophetically in the Washington Sentinel on November 3, 1900, almost two years after America annexed the fledgling Philippine Republic.
On the same day that the address of its Washington branch was published, Josephine Shaw Lowell, the first woman to be elected as an officer of the Anti-Imperialist League, stated the basis by which the fate of America and those of the peoples she subjugates are forcibly entwined: “When the people of the United States consent to deprive another people of its rights and liberties, they strike a terrific blow at the foundations upon which stand their own rights and liberties."
It gives you pause and makes you wonder.
So much shared history with America. And yet because so little of it seems to guide our Filipino leaders today, only the counsel of America’s warmongers is heard while the wisdom emanating from the unlikeliest of sources is neglected.
Like unheralded Americans. The common folks who see no need to wrap themselves with stars and stripes yet who, by their deeds, have become more star-spangled than all the thugs of Washington could ever hope to be.
Like Faith Fippinger, retired teacher for the blind: At 62 years of age, nearing the twilight of her years, Faith decided to live in the grounds of an aging oil refinery in Baghdad as a human shield in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq. For doing this the US treasury has threatened her with 12 years of prison and up to $1 million in fines.Yet Faith said she will not pay, “having made the decision to go there out of caring for human life, and then once there having to deal with the dead children from cluster bombs, and also seeing the young American military being killed."
Like John Titus, father of 28- year-old Alicia who was killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks:
“I yearn for release from the pain ... [from] the heartache that I feel each moment of each day since Alicia¡¦s death Forgiveness is a letting go of those feelings that long to consume you with a twisted grief filled with hate and revenge ... [but] that is not who I am and it would not bring my Alicia back ... must learn to forgive those responsible or the anger would consume me like a cancer ... Working for peace and justice in a world that seems so inept in both has given new meaning to my life. For this is what my dear Alicia was all about 'an old soul' because of her deep wisdom and constant search for truth to direct the course of her love ... The needless killing of my daughter and the other 3,000 victims of September 11th, along with the subsequent killing of the innocent children of Afghanistan and Iraq must cease!”
Like Wright Salisbury, the father-in-law of Ted Hennessey who was killed when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into a World Trade Center tower:
“[O]ur own government, and commercial interests that supported our government, had precipitated this attack as much as the vicious mentalities of the attackers. ... We must remember that the enemy does not live halfway around the globe, but in our own hearts, and that only with love of our fellow man will the hatreds of the world be ended once and for all.”
Like Amber Amundson, whose husband, Craig Scott Amundson, was killed in the attack on the Pentagon:
“I have heard angry rhetoric by some Americans, including many of our nation’s leaders, who advise a heavy dose of revenge and punishment. To those leaders, I would like to make it clear that my family and I take no comfort in your words of rage. If you choose to respond to this incomprehensible brutality by perpetuating violence against other innocent human beings, you may not do so in the name of justice for my husband.”
Like Peaceful Tomorrows, an organization founded by the families of those who perished in the September 11 attacks, which said on the second anniversary of 9/11 that America¡¦s military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq merely ¡§created more bereaved families like ours.”
“Ordinary Afghans killed by US bombs … the Iraqi dead … we hold them in our hearts today as another set of victims created by the tragedy of 9/11 ... While September 11 stands as a unique tragedy in the American experience, the sad reality is that people in other countries have been experiencing their own September 11 with much less fanfare all the time ... We are honored to stand with our brothers and sisters around the world who know that we the people must find another way to live together on this planet ... We owe it to the dead, we need it for the living and we must do it for the generations to follow.”
The greatest wealth in the world we stand to gain just by clasping the hands of those who truly embrace America’s ideals. Because these are our ideals, too. Peace. Solidarity. Respect.
----------------
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Op-Ed, TODAY and abscbnnews.com
"We can see only a career of slaughter, of devastation and of decay; murder and rapine abroad, and disturbances and misery at home. Such has ever been the bloody course of empire,¡¨ wrote the Washington Anti-Imperialist League prophetically in the Washington Sentinel on November 3, 1900, almost two years after America annexed the fledgling Philippine Republic.
On the same day that the address of its Washington branch was published, Josephine Shaw Lowell, the first woman to be elected as an officer of the Anti-Imperialist League, stated the basis by which the fate of America and those of the peoples she subjugates are forcibly entwined: “When the people of the United States consent to deprive another people of its rights and liberties, they strike a terrific blow at the foundations upon which stand their own rights and liberties."
It gives you pause and makes you wonder.
So much shared history with America. And yet because so little of it seems to guide our Filipino leaders today, only the counsel of America’s warmongers is heard while the wisdom emanating from the unlikeliest of sources is neglected.
Like unheralded Americans. The common folks who see no need to wrap themselves with stars and stripes yet who, by their deeds, have become more star-spangled than all the thugs of Washington could ever hope to be.
Like Faith Fippinger, retired teacher for the blind: At 62 years of age, nearing the twilight of her years, Faith decided to live in the grounds of an aging oil refinery in Baghdad as a human shield in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq. For doing this the US treasury has threatened her with 12 years of prison and up to $1 million in fines.Yet Faith said she will not pay, “having made the decision to go there out of caring for human life, and then once there having to deal with the dead children from cluster bombs, and also seeing the young American military being killed."
Like John Titus, father of 28- year-old Alicia who was killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks:
“I yearn for release from the pain ... [from] the heartache that I feel each moment of each day since Alicia¡¦s death Forgiveness is a letting go of those feelings that long to consume you with a twisted grief filled with hate and revenge ... [but] that is not who I am and it would not bring my Alicia back ... must learn to forgive those responsible or the anger would consume me like a cancer ... Working for peace and justice in a world that seems so inept in both has given new meaning to my life. For this is what my dear Alicia was all about 'an old soul' because of her deep wisdom and constant search for truth to direct the course of her love ... The needless killing of my daughter and the other 3,000 victims of September 11th, along with the subsequent killing of the innocent children of Afghanistan and Iraq must cease!”
Like Wright Salisbury, the father-in-law of Ted Hennessey who was killed when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into a World Trade Center tower:
“[O]ur own government, and commercial interests that supported our government, had precipitated this attack as much as the vicious mentalities of the attackers. ... We must remember that the enemy does not live halfway around the globe, but in our own hearts, and that only with love of our fellow man will the hatreds of the world be ended once and for all.”
Like Amber Amundson, whose husband, Craig Scott Amundson, was killed in the attack on the Pentagon:
“I have heard angry rhetoric by some Americans, including many of our nation’s leaders, who advise a heavy dose of revenge and punishment. To those leaders, I would like to make it clear that my family and I take no comfort in your words of rage. If you choose to respond to this incomprehensible brutality by perpetuating violence against other innocent human beings, you may not do so in the name of justice for my husband.”
Like Peaceful Tomorrows, an organization founded by the families of those who perished in the September 11 attacks, which said on the second anniversary of 9/11 that America¡¦s military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq merely ¡§created more bereaved families like ours.”
“Ordinary Afghans killed by US bombs … the Iraqi dead … we hold them in our hearts today as another set of victims created by the tragedy of 9/11 ... While September 11 stands as a unique tragedy in the American experience, the sad reality is that people in other countries have been experiencing their own September 11 with much less fanfare all the time ... We are honored to stand with our brothers and sisters around the world who know that we the people must find another way to live together on this planet ... We owe it to the dead, we need it for the living and we must do it for the generations to follow.”
The greatest wealth in the world we stand to gain just by clasping the hands of those who truly embrace America’s ideals. Because these are our ideals, too. Peace. Solidarity. Respect.
----------------
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Op-Ed, TODAY and abscbnnews.com
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
WHEN MADNESS PREYS ON DREAMS
Yvette e-mailed that she was still in Hargeisa and was safe, which was a relief.
Only days ago, a British couple was killed inside their residence in a town in Somaliland. Before that, Annalena Tonelli, a well-loved Italian aid worker, was murdered in the tuberculosis hospital she ran in Borama, the hometown of Somaliland’s president.
No one is certain who is behind the killings but police patrols have been increased while the houses and offices of members of UN agencies and international organizations, including the NGO Yvette belongs to, were provided security by the government.
Yvette is a Filipina activist in her early 30s who has spent over a decade of her life working with poor Filipino rural communities. Married to a loving husband and mother to a beautiful daughter, Yvette floored her friends when she announced some time ago that she would be working in Somaliland with an international development organization.
In Somaliland, where the life expectancy is 47 years and where one out of five children do not live to see their fifth birthday.
Par for the course, it seems, for a soaring restless Filipina soul, who also happens to be a godmother to my five-year old son.
“There is a woman in Somalia, scraping for pearls on the roadside,” writes Yvette in her blogspot jadedafrica.dekarabaw.com, which has attracted a global audience be cause of its elegance, in sight and account of Filipino solidarity and stoicism. “There’s a force stronger than nature, keeps her will alive. This is how she’s dying, dying to survive. Don’t know what she’s made of. I would like to be that brave.”
Yvette told me when she was in the country a few months ago that anti-Western sentiments ran high among Somalilanders after the American invasion of Iraq.
Her words came back to me while I was reading about the slain British nationals, and they troubled me.
Yvette is a foreigner too, a citizen of a predominantly Catholic country with all too close ties to the US. And I thought about Abdul Jabar, who was sentenced just weeks ago in an Indonesian court to 20 years’ imprisonment for his role in the car-bombing of the Jakarta residence of then-Philippine Ambassador Leonides Caday in August 2000.
Didn’t the vile group to which Jabar belonged single out the Philippine Embassy to avenge Muslims killed in the conflict in southern Philippines? A conflict that is increasingly seen as an extension of an undeclared war against Islam.
A war perceived to be led by a Christian fundamentalist leadership in America and perpetrated by a stooge Philippine government. A not-too-wild perception fostered by a Philippine government recklessly displaying to the world its fealty to America’s imperial ambitions.
I wonder with anxiety what shape the whirlwind will take next.
And which place -- or hearth -- it will next visit.
Extremist Islam is deepening its presence in Africa.
In Somaliland, clerics calling themselves “the Authority for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” are now trying to impose draconian moral codes on Somaliland citizens.
“These people are out to eradicate our culture, our traditions, our songs, our poetry and our folklore dances,” said a Somalilander lamenting the spread of Islamic extremism. “They brand our traditional children’s stories of Diin iyo Dacawo, arrawelo and dheg-dheer as bawdy literature that has no place in the puritanical society that they aspire to build.”
In Tanzania, writes Paul Marshall in The Washington Post, “Saudi Arabia is funding new mosques . . . and fundamentalists have bombed bars and beaten women they thought were inadequately covered.” Marshall laments that the United States has done little to confront this threat “either by challenging those exporting radical Islam or by promoting democracy.”
Much truth here. There is no democracy in Occupied Iraq, and in Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai is reduced to playing the role of mayor of Kabul.
And what about Saudi Arabia, the kingdom from which 15 of the September 11 hijackers came from? The place of origin of Wahhabism -- the extremist strain of Islam that is slowly eating into Africa. The brutal kingdom formerly inhabited by a certain Osama bin Laden.
Since September 11, 2001, US bilateral trade with Saudi Arabia has surged by 61 percent.
A fine partnership -- America remains the world’s top arms exporter and a top customer of Saudi oil, and Saudi Arabia the world’s top oil exporter and the top customer of US arms exports.
An “asymmetrical interdependence,” as former US National Security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski described it, slakes the empire’s addiction to oil and secures the ever tenuous rule of the Saudi monarchy.
The fornication of oily royalty and imperialism which continues to seed the extremism that brought the war to America’s shores and, perhaps, to all those unfortunate enough to be identified with the empire’s unholy alliances.
I fear for the safety of those who may be haunted by the specters spawned by the wedding of greed with greed -- like Filipino workers in Saudi Arabia slaving away to nourish the hope of a better future for their families. Or people like Yvette, whose devotion to the lingering dream of a better world keeps her in Somaliland.
“When valor preys on reason,” said Shakespeare, “it eats the sword it fights with.”
And yet there is not even any valor here.
In America’s phony ‘war on terror,’ there is only madness, fueled by the hubris of great powers and sustained by the cowardice of the leaders of small nations who prostitute themselves in exchange for a few pieces of silver.
----------
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Opinion TODAY and abs-cbnnews.com
Yvette e-mailed that she was still in Hargeisa and was safe, which was a relief.
Only days ago, a British couple was killed inside their residence in a town in Somaliland. Before that, Annalena Tonelli, a well-loved Italian aid worker, was murdered in the tuberculosis hospital she ran in Borama, the hometown of Somaliland’s president.
No one is certain who is behind the killings but police patrols have been increased while the houses and offices of members of UN agencies and international organizations, including the NGO Yvette belongs to, were provided security by the government.
Yvette is a Filipina activist in her early 30s who has spent over a decade of her life working with poor Filipino rural communities. Married to a loving husband and mother to a beautiful daughter, Yvette floored her friends when she announced some time ago that she would be working in Somaliland with an international development organization.
In Somaliland, where the life expectancy is 47 years and where one out of five children do not live to see their fifth birthday.
Par for the course, it seems, for a soaring restless Filipina soul, who also happens to be a godmother to my five-year old son.
“There is a woman in Somalia, scraping for pearls on the roadside,” writes Yvette in her blogspot jadedafrica.dekarabaw.com, which has attracted a global audience be cause of its elegance, in sight and account of Filipino solidarity and stoicism. “There’s a force stronger than nature, keeps her will alive. This is how she’s dying, dying to survive. Don’t know what she’s made of. I would like to be that brave.”
Yvette told me when she was in the country a few months ago that anti-Western sentiments ran high among Somalilanders after the American invasion of Iraq.
Her words came back to me while I was reading about the slain British nationals, and they troubled me.
Yvette is a foreigner too, a citizen of a predominantly Catholic country with all too close ties to the US. And I thought about Abdul Jabar, who was sentenced just weeks ago in an Indonesian court to 20 years’ imprisonment for his role in the car-bombing of the Jakarta residence of then-Philippine Ambassador Leonides Caday in August 2000.
Didn’t the vile group to which Jabar belonged single out the Philippine Embassy to avenge Muslims killed in the conflict in southern Philippines? A conflict that is increasingly seen as an extension of an undeclared war against Islam.
A war perceived to be led by a Christian fundamentalist leadership in America and perpetrated by a stooge Philippine government. A not-too-wild perception fostered by a Philippine government recklessly displaying to the world its fealty to America’s imperial ambitions.
I wonder with anxiety what shape the whirlwind will take next.
And which place -- or hearth -- it will next visit.
Extremist Islam is deepening its presence in Africa.
In Somaliland, clerics calling themselves “the Authority for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” are now trying to impose draconian moral codes on Somaliland citizens.
“These people are out to eradicate our culture, our traditions, our songs, our poetry and our folklore dances,” said a Somalilander lamenting the spread of Islamic extremism. “They brand our traditional children’s stories of Diin iyo Dacawo, arrawelo and dheg-dheer as bawdy literature that has no place in the puritanical society that they aspire to build.”
In Tanzania, writes Paul Marshall in The Washington Post, “Saudi Arabia is funding new mosques . . . and fundamentalists have bombed bars and beaten women they thought were inadequately covered.” Marshall laments that the United States has done little to confront this threat “either by challenging those exporting radical Islam or by promoting democracy.”
Much truth here. There is no democracy in Occupied Iraq, and in Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai is reduced to playing the role of mayor of Kabul.
And what about Saudi Arabia, the kingdom from which 15 of the September 11 hijackers came from? The place of origin of Wahhabism -- the extremist strain of Islam that is slowly eating into Africa. The brutal kingdom formerly inhabited by a certain Osama bin Laden.
Since September 11, 2001, US bilateral trade with Saudi Arabia has surged by 61 percent.
A fine partnership -- America remains the world’s top arms exporter and a top customer of Saudi oil, and Saudi Arabia the world’s top oil exporter and the top customer of US arms exports.
An “asymmetrical interdependence,” as former US National Security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski described it, slakes the empire’s addiction to oil and secures the ever tenuous rule of the Saudi monarchy.
The fornication of oily royalty and imperialism which continues to seed the extremism that brought the war to America’s shores and, perhaps, to all those unfortunate enough to be identified with the empire’s unholy alliances.
I fear for the safety of those who may be haunted by the specters spawned by the wedding of greed with greed -- like Filipino workers in Saudi Arabia slaving away to nourish the hope of a better future for their families. Or people like Yvette, whose devotion to the lingering dream of a better world keeps her in Somaliland.
“When valor preys on reason,” said Shakespeare, “it eats the sword it fights with.”
And yet there is not even any valor here.
In America’s phony ‘war on terror,’ there is only madness, fueled by the hubris of great powers and sustained by the cowardice of the leaders of small nations who prostitute themselves in exchange for a few pieces of silver.
----------
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Opinion TODAY and abs-cbnnews.com
Monday, October 20, 2003
KYOTO PROTOCOL: THE BALL IS WITH VILLAR
We had our chance last week. The Philippine government could have taken a break from its pom-pom waving and caused the passage of the climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol.
A ratified greenhouse accord would at least have given the Philippine government a semblance of independence. It would at least have signaled our country’s resolve in pursuing another preventive war, the genuine one, which demands to be waged.
Not the appalling “war on terror” but the campaign to prevent serious damage being inflicted on the world’s climate.
A “war” that intends to phase out the use of fossil fuels and not a flimsy oilman’s excuse to invade a sovereign country in order to grab its oil.
“Long-term security is threatened by a problem at least as dangerous as chemical, nuclear or biological weapons, or indeed international terrorism: human-induced climate change,” said Sir John Houghton, the UK’s most eminent climate scientist, in a blistering attack on Bush in July. Houghton took Bush to task for “an abdication of leadership of epic proportions.”
Climate change. It’s the greatest environmental threat facing the planet today and yet the US, the country most responsible for emitting the greatest portion of greenhouse gases that has caused the alarming warming of the planet, has gone on a trajectory that, if not changed, can only spell ruin for the entire global populace.
A trajectory de fined by America’s twin acts of aggression to secure the fossil-fuel re sources of the Middle East and Central Asia.
And, before that, its disgraceful withdrawal from the Kyoto climate treaty, which seeks, among other things, to curb the use of oil, gas and coal.
The US represents only 4 percent of the world population yet it produces 25 percent of global greenhouse gases and the US has no wish for that to change. Or maybe, more accurately, the fossil fuel interests lodged firmly in Washington does not want that to change. Companies like Enron and Exxon-Mobil didn’t lavish the Bush campaign for nothing. And high on their priorities was the gutting of the Kyoto Protocol, which requires industrialized countries to return their greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels in order to stabilize the climate.
The Protocol merely calls for the start of reductions among developed nations, and a very fractional reduction at that. Yet the Rogue State still said no, and in 2001 it rejected the Protocol.
It is a fact that our excessive burning of fossil fuels is raising our planet’s thermostat to dangerous levels, provoking “an unprecedented catalogue of weather-related disasters” like storms, floods, droughts and fires.
According to Munich Reinsurance, the lead player in a business sector considered by many as a canary in the coal mine on the issue of global warming, “[T]he insurance industry must be prepared to face quite new loss dimensions in terms of natural catastrophes because the loss trends will continue to grow worse. [W]e are still at the beginning of a truly menacing development. [T]he negative effects of climate change will become more and more pronounced, manifesting themselves, especially in the form of extreme weather situations.”
As the World Meteorological Organization propounded in July, “Recent scientific assessments indicate that, as the global temperatures continue to warm due to climate change, the number and intensity of extreme events might increase.”
It makes one think of the estimated 15,000 people who died in France in August as a result of the deadliest heat wave ever to hit the country. Or the swift collapse in March last year of Larsen B, an Antarctic ice shelf 200 meters thick with a surface area the size of a small European country.
According to Dr. Warwick Vincent, a biologist in polar eco logy, “the most recent changes are substantial and correlate with this recent increase in warming seen from the 1960s to the present. A critical threshold has been passed.”
Need it be mentioned that the Philippines, an archipelagic country, is especially vulnerable to climate change? Increases in sea levels are expected to inundate low-lying areas in Metro Manila and Metro Cebu. Irrigation waters are projected to be subject to increased salinity.
More frequent and severe storms and droughts pose grave risks to Philippine agriculture. Diseases like dengue borne by insects that thrive in warming climates are expected to become more widespread as temperatures increase and government spending for health services deteriorates.
“For the American superpower, the Philippines has renewed geopolitical importance, in the light of the global antiterrorist campaign. [T]he US presence in East Asia should increase in scale and intensity,” said Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople who, like the rest of the Arroyo administration officials, fawned over the visit of US President Bush to the Philippines on October 18.
The same Ople who said only months ago when he was still a senator that “allies of the United States frown on what they perceive to be US unilateralism. The world’s only superpower must be accountable to people outside their country because what the US does affects people outside its borders.” Ople was referring to the issue of global warming, which he said “is not a distant threat but an imminent one, especially in the Philippines.”
A global threat which the Kyoto Protocol seeks to alleviate.
Unfortunately, said Ople at the Philippine Senate, when most of his vertebrae was still intact, “the United States is the biggest single stumbling block to the implementation of the Kyoto treaty.” If the Foreign Affairs secretary can’t locate the spine that once upon a time empowered him to say this, perhaps his former colleagues at the Senate can help him in his search.There is still time for Sen. Manuel Villar, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, to teach the Arroyo and Bush administrations a lesson about leadership. A lesson that may be taught via the Senate’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.
Passage of the treaty would proclaim that if the head of the superpower and his underlings will not take the steps necessary to protect Philippine interests and the global commons, a few good men in the Philippine Senate can and will.
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Sources:
“According to World Meteorological Organization, extreme weather events might increase,” World Meteorological Organization press release (WMO-No 695), Geneva, July 2, 2003; “Climate expert accuses PM of cowardice,” Paul Brown, The Guardian, July 28, 2003; Philippine Senate Resolution “Urging the realignment of the Philippines with the European Union and the majority of the world’s countries supporting the Kyoto Treaty which seeks to curtail the emission of industrial gases that produce global warming” S.B. 137 introduced by Senator Blas F. Ople, Twelfth Congress of the Republic of the Philippines, First Regular Session.
We had our chance last week. The Philippine government could have taken a break from its pom-pom waving and caused the passage of the climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol.
A ratified greenhouse accord would at least have given the Philippine government a semblance of independence. It would at least have signaled our country’s resolve in pursuing another preventive war, the genuine one, which demands to be waged.
Not the appalling “war on terror” but the campaign to prevent serious damage being inflicted on the world’s climate.
A “war” that intends to phase out the use of fossil fuels and not a flimsy oilman’s excuse to invade a sovereign country in order to grab its oil.
“Long-term security is threatened by a problem at least as dangerous as chemical, nuclear or biological weapons, or indeed international terrorism: human-induced climate change,” said Sir John Houghton, the UK’s most eminent climate scientist, in a blistering attack on Bush in July. Houghton took Bush to task for “an abdication of leadership of epic proportions.”
Climate change. It’s the greatest environmental threat facing the planet today and yet the US, the country most responsible for emitting the greatest portion of greenhouse gases that has caused the alarming warming of the planet, has gone on a trajectory that, if not changed, can only spell ruin for the entire global populace.
A trajectory de fined by America’s twin acts of aggression to secure the fossil-fuel re sources of the Middle East and Central Asia.
And, before that, its disgraceful withdrawal from the Kyoto climate treaty, which seeks, among other things, to curb the use of oil, gas and coal.
The US represents only 4 percent of the world population yet it produces 25 percent of global greenhouse gases and the US has no wish for that to change. Or maybe, more accurately, the fossil fuel interests lodged firmly in Washington does not want that to change. Companies like Enron and Exxon-Mobil didn’t lavish the Bush campaign for nothing. And high on their priorities was the gutting of the Kyoto Protocol, which requires industrialized countries to return their greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels in order to stabilize the climate.
The Protocol merely calls for the start of reductions among developed nations, and a very fractional reduction at that. Yet the Rogue State still said no, and in 2001 it rejected the Protocol.
It is a fact that our excessive burning of fossil fuels is raising our planet’s thermostat to dangerous levels, provoking “an unprecedented catalogue of weather-related disasters” like storms, floods, droughts and fires.
According to Munich Reinsurance, the lead player in a business sector considered by many as a canary in the coal mine on the issue of global warming, “[T]he insurance industry must be prepared to face quite new loss dimensions in terms of natural catastrophes because the loss trends will continue to grow worse. [W]e are still at the beginning of a truly menacing development. [T]he negative effects of climate change will become more and more pronounced, manifesting themselves, especially in the form of extreme weather situations.”
As the World Meteorological Organization propounded in July, “Recent scientific assessments indicate that, as the global temperatures continue to warm due to climate change, the number and intensity of extreme events might increase.”
It makes one think of the estimated 15,000 people who died in France in August as a result of the deadliest heat wave ever to hit the country. Or the swift collapse in March last year of Larsen B, an Antarctic ice shelf 200 meters thick with a surface area the size of a small European country.
According to Dr. Warwick Vincent, a biologist in polar eco logy, “the most recent changes are substantial and correlate with this recent increase in warming seen from the 1960s to the present. A critical threshold has been passed.”
Need it be mentioned that the Philippines, an archipelagic country, is especially vulnerable to climate change? Increases in sea levels are expected to inundate low-lying areas in Metro Manila and Metro Cebu. Irrigation waters are projected to be subject to increased salinity.
More frequent and severe storms and droughts pose grave risks to Philippine agriculture. Diseases like dengue borne by insects that thrive in warming climates are expected to become more widespread as temperatures increase and government spending for health services deteriorates.
“For the American superpower, the Philippines has renewed geopolitical importance, in the light of the global antiterrorist campaign. [T]he US presence in East Asia should increase in scale and intensity,” said Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople who, like the rest of the Arroyo administration officials, fawned over the visit of US President Bush to the Philippines on October 18.
The same Ople who said only months ago when he was still a senator that “allies of the United States frown on what they perceive to be US unilateralism. The world’s only superpower must be accountable to people outside their country because what the US does affects people outside its borders.” Ople was referring to the issue of global warming, which he said “is not a distant threat but an imminent one, especially in the Philippines.”
A global threat which the Kyoto Protocol seeks to alleviate.
Unfortunately, said Ople at the Philippine Senate, when most of his vertebrae was still intact, “the United States is the biggest single stumbling block to the implementation of the Kyoto treaty.” If the Foreign Affairs secretary can’t locate the spine that once upon a time empowered him to say this, perhaps his former colleagues at the Senate can help him in his search.There is still time for Sen. Manuel Villar, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, to teach the Arroyo and Bush administrations a lesson about leadership. A lesson that may be taught via the Senate’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.
Passage of the treaty would proclaim that if the head of the superpower and his underlings will not take the steps necessary to protect Philippine interests and the global commons, a few good men in the Philippine Senate can and will.
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Sources:
“According to World Meteorological Organization, extreme weather events might increase,” World Meteorological Organization press release (WMO-No 695), Geneva, July 2, 2003; “Climate expert accuses PM of cowardice,” Paul Brown, The Guardian, July 28, 2003; Philippine Senate Resolution “Urging the realignment of the Philippines with the European Union and the majority of the world’s countries supporting the Kyoto Treaty which seeks to curtail the emission of industrial gases that produce global warming” S.B. 137 introduced by Senator Blas F. Ople, Twelfth Congress of the Republic of the Philippines, First Regular Session.
Monday, October 13, 2003
BLAST FROM THE PAST
Booze time at the bar or a quiet evening at home paying homage to the artists. So many things American to celebrate on October 18.
Blues giant Chuck Berry was born on this day in 1926. The same birthday as jazz great Wynton Marsalis, who was born in 1961 in New Orleans.
Unfortunately, the Philippines won’t be commemorating the birthdays of these magical artists. The Philippine government prefers the music of imperial America -- a more suitable accompaniment to the famed multiple cartwheels of its cheerleading.
We can expect the garlands to be ready by October 18, when George W. Bush arrives in the Philippines to applaud the Arroyo administration’s Bambi-eyed support to America’s “War on Terror.”
One more Filipino government shamefully displaying its utter lack of historical memory.
“[W]e acted in Iraq . . . in one of the swiftest and most humane military campaigns in history,” said George Bush on September 7, in a speech that likely caused his ratings to further plunge.
What a funny thing to say after slaughtering thousands of Iraqi civilians.
Some things apparently never change.
Gen. Arthur MacArthur also called the Philippine-American War at the turn of the last century “the most legitimate and humane war ever conducted on the face of the earth.” A war where the estimated number of Filipinos who died as a result of America’s annexation went from 250,000 to one million.
No one knows the exact figures, of course. Only dead Americans were counted by the US Army then. A practice continued by the US Army in Iraq today.
Some things never do change.
“The boys go for the enemy as if they were chasing jack-rabbits,” said Colonel Funston of the 20th Kansas Volunteers as his men slaughtered Filipinos defending the fledgling Philippine republic against the American invaders.
“I, for one, hope that Uncle Sam will apply the chastening rod, good, hard and plenty, and lay it on until [the Filipinos] come into the reservation and promise to be good ‘Injuns.’”
Here is an American pilot talking about the joys of napalm while America was attempting to “liberate” Vietnam: “We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn’t so hot -- if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene -- now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they added Willie Peter [white phosphorous] so’s to make it burn better. It’ll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.”
And here is US Gen. John Kelly articulating his desire to improve the plight of wretched Iraqis during America’s invasion of Iraq in April:
“They stand, they fight, sometimes they run when we engage them. But often they run into our machine guns and we shoot them down like the morons they are . . . They appear willing to die. We are trying our best to help them out in that endeavor.”
By such uncanny love does America inherit the world’s affections.
In 1899 the American Anti-Imperialist League crafted a platform that sought to steer the United States away from its desire to annex the Philippines. The manifesto, which opposed the annexation of the Philippines because it ran counter to America’s traditions, should be required reading today for all:
“We insist that the subjugation of any people is ‘criminal aggression’ and open disloyalty to the distinctive principles of our government . . . We demand the immediate cessation of the war . . . We propose to contribute to the defeat of any person or party that stands for the forcible subjugation of any people. We shall oppose for reelection all who in the White House or in Congress betray American liberty in pursuit of un-American ends . . . We hold with Abraham Lincoln, that “no man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. When the white man governs himself, that is self-government, but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government -- that is despotism.”’
Funny that Emperor Bush is arriving in the Philippines on October 18 -- the exact same day 104 years ago that the League’s Platform was created.
----
Op-Ed TODAY and abscbnnews.com
Booze time at the bar or a quiet evening at home paying homage to the artists. So many things American to celebrate on October 18.
Blues giant Chuck Berry was born on this day in 1926. The same birthday as jazz great Wynton Marsalis, who was born in 1961 in New Orleans.
Unfortunately, the Philippines won’t be commemorating the birthdays of these magical artists. The Philippine government prefers the music of imperial America -- a more suitable accompaniment to the famed multiple cartwheels of its cheerleading.
We can expect the garlands to be ready by October 18, when George W. Bush arrives in the Philippines to applaud the Arroyo administration’s Bambi-eyed support to America’s “War on Terror.”
One more Filipino government shamefully displaying its utter lack of historical memory.
“[W]e acted in Iraq . . . in one of the swiftest and most humane military campaigns in history,” said George Bush on September 7, in a speech that likely caused his ratings to further plunge.
What a funny thing to say after slaughtering thousands of Iraqi civilians.
Some things apparently never change.
Gen. Arthur MacArthur also called the Philippine-American War at the turn of the last century “the most legitimate and humane war ever conducted on the face of the earth.” A war where the estimated number of Filipinos who died as a result of America’s annexation went from 250,000 to one million.
No one knows the exact figures, of course. Only dead Americans were counted by the US Army then. A practice continued by the US Army in Iraq today.
Some things never do change.
“The boys go for the enemy as if they were chasing jack-rabbits,” said Colonel Funston of the 20th Kansas Volunteers as his men slaughtered Filipinos defending the fledgling Philippine republic against the American invaders.
“I, for one, hope that Uncle Sam will apply the chastening rod, good, hard and plenty, and lay it on until [the Filipinos] come into the reservation and promise to be good ‘Injuns.’”
Here is an American pilot talking about the joys of napalm while America was attempting to “liberate” Vietnam: “We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn’t so hot -- if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene -- now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they added Willie Peter [white phosphorous] so’s to make it burn better. It’ll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.”
And here is US Gen. John Kelly articulating his desire to improve the plight of wretched Iraqis during America’s invasion of Iraq in April:
“They stand, they fight, sometimes they run when we engage them. But often they run into our machine guns and we shoot them down like the morons they are . . . They appear willing to die. We are trying our best to help them out in that endeavor.”
By such uncanny love does America inherit the world’s affections.
In 1899 the American Anti-Imperialist League crafted a platform that sought to steer the United States away from its desire to annex the Philippines. The manifesto, which opposed the annexation of the Philippines because it ran counter to America’s traditions, should be required reading today for all:
“We insist that the subjugation of any people is ‘criminal aggression’ and open disloyalty to the distinctive principles of our government . . . We demand the immediate cessation of the war . . . We propose to contribute to the defeat of any person or party that stands for the forcible subjugation of any people. We shall oppose for reelection all who in the White House or in Congress betray American liberty in pursuit of un-American ends . . . We hold with Abraham Lincoln, that “no man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. When the white man governs himself, that is self-government, but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government -- that is despotism.”’
Funny that Emperor Bush is arriving in the Philippines on October 18 -- the exact same day 104 years ago that the League’s Platform was created.
----
Op-Ed TODAY and abscbnnews.com
Monday, October 06, 2003
ANNIVERSARY OF A WHISTLE BLOWER
Last September 30 was a day that marked many things.
It marked a day in 1955 when the rebel without a cause, James Dean, died from a car crash.
It marked the day when the magnificent Muhammad Ali collided with Smokin’ Joe Frazier for the third time. The Thrilla in Manila. September 30, 1975. Ali would survive the mighty Frazier’s threshing-blade punches and retain his heavyweight title via a 14th round TKO and claim the huge golden trophy donated by Ferdinand Marcos. The dictator was still one of America’s golden boys then.
Many things happened on September 30. On that day in 1946, 22 Nazi leaders were found guilty of war crimes in a trial which established “as a matter of international law that planning and launching an aggressive war was a criminal act.”
“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes,” said Robert Jackson, the lead US prosecutor at Nuremberg in 1946, “they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
Some anniversaries exist so that we may not forget. Like September 30, 1986, when Mordechai Vanunu was kidnapped by the Mossad in Rome. Vanunu was the world’s first independent nuclear arms inspector, and had he been Iranian, Iraqi or Korean, imperial America would still be throwing rose petals at his feet.
His only crime was to warn the world of the madness that had caused the leadership of his country, Israel, to stockpile up to 200 nuclear weapons. An act of conscience for which Vanunu would be kidnapped, drugged and shipped to Israel to be
sentenced in a secret trial to 18 years’ imprisonment.
For ‘treason’ and ‘espionage’ even “though he had received no payment and communicated with no foreign power.” A prisoner of conscience.
The first 11 years of his incarceration he would spend in complete isolation. Israel’s Justice Ministry -- a misplaced name -- would allow Vanunu to mingle with other prisoners only in 1998 -- when the ministry decided -- after 11 years -- that “extended isolation would damage his mental state.”
He will soon walk free when his abominable sentence ends on April next year -- unless the vile Sharon government comes up with another reason to keep the brave man behind bars.
According to his supporters, despite this possibility, “Vanunu’s opposition to nuclear weapons remains steadfast and his cruel punishment has not broken his spirit.” A spirit elevated by the desire for peace.
“His story reads like a tragic thriller. But it’s real life,” said Hilary Wainwright of the Guardian. Indeed.
From 1976 to 1985, Vanunu had been a technician at Dimona, Israel’s nuclear installation in the Negrev desert. It was at Dimona where he would learn of Israel’s secret production of plutonium for nuclear weapons. And it was at Dimona where he would document Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal.
The world learned of Israel’s clandestine armory when the London Sunday Times published Vanunu’s interviews and photographs as its banner story on October 5, 1986. Five days, tragically, after Vanunu was abducted by the thugs of the Mossad.
Vanunu’s photographs would reveal nuclear weapons devices, neutron bombs, deliverable warheads and “the underground plutonium separation facility where Israel was producing 40 kilograms annually.” In 1986. When America was still in bed with Saddam.
How time flies. Or does it? Who can tell?
The world is still hurtling to ward greater conflict -- courtesy of the American government’s bungling and hubris; the Bush administration is now hunting down erstwhile family friend Saddam; and, Israel remains America’s Middle East gendarme, as strong and arrogant as ever.Israel started the nuclear arms race in the Middle East, yet today it is “the only state in the Middle East region that is not party to the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.”
Israel is the world’s sixth largest nuclear power yet neither the Dimona nuclear weapons factory, which Vanunu exposed, nor Israel’s biological and chemical weapons factory in Nes Zion, are open to international inspection.
And yet America’s vaunted intelligence community continues to search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and cackles at Iran to admit it has “a nuclear weapons program.”
How much would things have changed if the world had listened to Vanunu, the ordinary technician who brings to mind John Ruskin’s words: “The highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes because of it.”
Vanunu. The man who diagnosed what was wrong with the world in a small poem he had written in Ashkelon prison: “I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don’t look left or right, don’t read the text. Don’t look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp.”
A salve and slavery Vanunu would refuse.
He refused to be a cog in the machine and chose to tell the world of the horrible secrets his country was harboring. And for his simple act people lifted him to the place of honor alongside Rigoberta Menchu, Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi. A citizen of the world.
Last September 30 was a day that marked many things.
It marked a day in 1955 when the rebel without a cause, James Dean, died from a car crash.
It marked the day when the magnificent Muhammad Ali collided with Smokin’ Joe Frazier for the third time. The Thrilla in Manila. September 30, 1975. Ali would survive the mighty Frazier’s threshing-blade punches and retain his heavyweight title via a 14th round TKO and claim the huge golden trophy donated by Ferdinand Marcos. The dictator was still one of America’s golden boys then.
Many things happened on September 30. On that day in 1946, 22 Nazi leaders were found guilty of war crimes in a trial which established “as a matter of international law that planning and launching an aggressive war was a criminal act.”
“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes,” said Robert Jackson, the lead US prosecutor at Nuremberg in 1946, “they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
Some anniversaries exist so that we may not forget. Like September 30, 1986, when Mordechai Vanunu was kidnapped by the Mossad in Rome. Vanunu was the world’s first independent nuclear arms inspector, and had he been Iranian, Iraqi or Korean, imperial America would still be throwing rose petals at his feet.
His only crime was to warn the world of the madness that had caused the leadership of his country, Israel, to stockpile up to 200 nuclear weapons. An act of conscience for which Vanunu would be kidnapped, drugged and shipped to Israel to be
sentenced in a secret trial to 18 years’ imprisonment.
For ‘treason’ and ‘espionage’ even “though he had received no payment and communicated with no foreign power.” A prisoner of conscience.
The first 11 years of his incarceration he would spend in complete isolation. Israel’s Justice Ministry -- a misplaced name -- would allow Vanunu to mingle with other prisoners only in 1998 -- when the ministry decided -- after 11 years -- that “extended isolation would damage his mental state.”
He will soon walk free when his abominable sentence ends on April next year -- unless the vile Sharon government comes up with another reason to keep the brave man behind bars.
According to his supporters, despite this possibility, “Vanunu’s opposition to nuclear weapons remains steadfast and his cruel punishment has not broken his spirit.” A spirit elevated by the desire for peace.
“His story reads like a tragic thriller. But it’s real life,” said Hilary Wainwright of the Guardian. Indeed.
From 1976 to 1985, Vanunu had been a technician at Dimona, Israel’s nuclear installation in the Negrev desert. It was at Dimona where he would learn of Israel’s secret production of plutonium for nuclear weapons. And it was at Dimona where he would document Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal.
The world learned of Israel’s clandestine armory when the London Sunday Times published Vanunu’s interviews and photographs as its banner story on October 5, 1986. Five days, tragically, after Vanunu was abducted by the thugs of the Mossad.
Vanunu’s photographs would reveal nuclear weapons devices, neutron bombs, deliverable warheads and “the underground plutonium separation facility where Israel was producing 40 kilograms annually.” In 1986. When America was still in bed with Saddam.
How time flies. Or does it? Who can tell?
The world is still hurtling to ward greater conflict -- courtesy of the American government’s bungling and hubris; the Bush administration is now hunting down erstwhile family friend Saddam; and, Israel remains America’s Middle East gendarme, as strong and arrogant as ever.Israel started the nuclear arms race in the Middle East, yet today it is “the only state in the Middle East region that is not party to the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.”
Israel is the world’s sixth largest nuclear power yet neither the Dimona nuclear weapons factory, which Vanunu exposed, nor Israel’s biological and chemical weapons factory in Nes Zion, are open to international inspection.
And yet America’s vaunted intelligence community continues to search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and cackles at Iran to admit it has “a nuclear weapons program.”
How much would things have changed if the world had listened to Vanunu, the ordinary technician who brings to mind John Ruskin’s words: “The highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes because of it.”
Vanunu. The man who diagnosed what was wrong with the world in a small poem he had written in Ashkelon prison: “I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don’t look left or right, don’t read the text. Don’t look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp.”
A salve and slavery Vanunu would refuse.
He refused to be a cog in the machine and chose to tell the world of the horrible secrets his country was harboring. And for his simple act people lifted him to the place of honor alongside Rigoberta Menchu, Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi. A citizen of the world.
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